Month: February 2012

Requisitions vs. Purchase Orders

Week #2.

We’ve had a few questions about how to route Purchase Orders for approval.  In SpendMap, you don’t route POs for approval, you route Requisitions for approval.

But requisitions can then be converted into Purchase Orders automatically once they’re approved, so for all intents and purposes it’s the same thing. We just use the term “Requisition” to refer to the internal transaction that’s circulated for approval, while “Purchase Order” refers to the official order that goes to the supplier.

Many of you are coming from manual, paper-based environments, so you might be using the same piece if paper for both the internal approval process as well as placing the order with the supplier.  (more…)

First Things First

Launching the world’s first free e-procurement system got me thinking about “firsts”. Where does it all go?

If you’re going to automate your company’s purchasing and control your spending, you need a place to start. So for my first “real” blog post (so far, they’ve mostly been about the status of the project), I thought I’d point you in the right direction with a little piece of Purchasing 101.

Managing your company’s spending is just like managing your personal finances.  If you want to cut the waste and spend less, the best place to start is by just keeping track of your expenditures.

Even before you set yourself a budget or try to change your spending habits (that comes later), if all you do is keep track of where the money is going, somehow magically you will spend less. (this is well documented – I didn’t make it up)

In the business world, that means using Purchase Orders.  If you don’t start recording it, if you don’t have one place that everyone has to go before pulling out the check book or that corporate P-Card, there’s no way you will ever get to Step 2.

So if you’re not using Purchase Orders to track your spending, forget everything else for now and do just that.

Even something as basic as a Purchase Order form or an Excel template is better than nothing.  Better yet, download a free copy of SpendMap.  It’s way easier and you’ll get much better reporting so you’ll have the information you need to get to Step 2, whatever that may be.

Do you have any other tips or tricks that you can share with our readers?  If so, please add a comment, below.

Your Free Purchase Order Software is Here

Did you hear the “pop”?  That was us celebrating the arrival of the world’s first free e-procurement system.

You can download your copy here.

We’ve tried to predict your questions and we put that knowledge into the online help system and the first round of tutorial videos.  But we aren’t expecting to hit a home run right out of the gate, so please send us your feedback and let us know what else we can do to help.

And don’t forget to sign up for this Blog.  As we add to the software and our library of tutorials or other resources, we’ll be making blog posts to let you know that there’s something new to help.  If you don’t follow the blog, you won’t find out about the new stuff.

Thanks again for trying the free version of SpendMap!

Support System Now Online

The new support system is now online, so you can get free support for your free software.

I know, I know, you need the software before you need support.  We’re almost there.  Just working through a couple issues with the installer program, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get the system up and running.

So in the meantime, while our developers are putting the bow on the package, the rest of us have had an opportunity to tie up some loose ends, like the new support system, finishing up a couple sections of the Online Help, and so on.

So the whole package will be a bit more polished, which I think you’ll all appreciate.

Hang in there everyone…we’re very close.