When it comes to keeping records of your Purchasing work, I have one piece of advice: SAVE EVERYTHING!
A logical prerequisite to being able to save everything is that your work is in tangible form. Therefore, e-mails are preferable to conversations. Of course, e-mail is not always practical in a given situation or the best way to discuss a particular topic. In those cases, simply follow up after the verbal conversation with an e-mail summarizing the main topics and any agreements that were reached.
This advice will prove invaluable if there are any contract or vendor management disputes in the future. Sometimes everyone agrees to and understands contract language, but when the original participants are gone, the new ones may have questions that can be resolved by digging out old notes.
I can't tell you the number of times that someone has asked a question years later about a vendor, a spreadsheet or a meeting long forgotten. I have referred to other Buyers' written notes years after they left a company and I have been contacted by a company years after I left because they needed help revisiting an old problem.
Save everything and you'll make your life easier (except when it comes to electronic and physical storage space)!
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