Control Spending

How to display ONLY those items from the supplier on your Purchase Order

There is a new feature in version 14 of SpendMap that you can use to limit the items that your staff can select while entering Purchase Orders, such that they will only be able to select the standard items that you have set up for that supplier in advance. That is, you can prohibit the use of non-standard items/suppliers.

Just use the new setting in PO Entry Settings, which you can find here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system> Purchase Order settings > PO entry settings

Alternatively, without this formal restriction, users can also search for items by supplier while entering new POs.

Finally, if you forgo the restriction and allow your staff to select non-standard items/suppliers but still want to know when it’s happening, you can use the setting “Log if non-standard supplier is chosen”, in System Alert Log Settings…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > System alert log settings

Job Costing and Budgets in your Free PO Software

Ed wants to use the free version of SpendMap to track costs to projects/jobs at his engineering and construction company in Iowa. Ed asked… Control spending to save money

“Is it possible to set up the Chart of Accounts to do Job Costing. I would like to report on Job Number, then Labor, Material, Equipment, Subcontractor, Other and Tax. Many Job numbers, but always the same cost categories.”

Yes. You can learn all about the various “account code” fields, and how you can track charges to those accounts, in the following section of the Online Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > Master Files > Account Coding (Overview & Guidelines)

Ed would likely rename the Cost Center field to “Job”, and the GL field to “Cost Category” (or similar). All the account code fields are user-definable, so you can rename their titles, but “cost center” is typically used to track “who or what” is using the item being purchased (Jobs in this case), while GL Account is usually used to indicate the type of item being purchased (what Ed describes as “cost categories”).

For more about why we normally suggest using the Cost Center and GL fields specifically rather than the other account code fields (one of which is already called “Job” by default), please see the subsection “Account Code Fields and Segmentation”, and specifically the link for “About Cost Centers and G/L Accounts” in the above section of the Help.

“Also, could the system report against a budget in each of the categories?”

Yes, you can track and report on your budgets, by Cost Center (Job) and by GL (cost category) within each Job. For more details, please see this section of the Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > System-Wide Features and Utilities > Cost Center History and Budgets (About)

And if you’d like to see an example of how to set this up, just go into your Evaluation Copy of SpendMap (the one with the sample data) and take a look at the [Matching G/L Accounts/Budgets] Folder, for the Cost Center “SYSTEMS” (IT Department), in here…
– PURCHASING > Master Files > Cost Centers > Add/Modify/Delete

You will see that the SYSTEMS Cost Center has separate GL-level budgets specified for various types of “spend categories”, like IT purchases, office supplies and freight charges.

Cost Center history and budget reports

Wasting Money is Scary for SMBs

FRIDAY-THE-13TH Wasting money is pretty scary for most small and medium size businesses.

It’s hard enough to run a profitable business these days, without having to worry about your staff spending money that they shouldn’t be.

Get control of your spending and see where the money is going, with SpendMap’s free Purchasing Management Software.

Happy Friday the 13th.

How rejected requisitions affect budgets in your free Purchase Order Software

David works at a government agency in Texas and was wondering why rejected requisitions still show as commitments to the cost center’s budget.

Based on the settings in the Requisitions and Approvals Module, rejected requisitions will stay in the budget temporarily because often the Requisitioner will modify and re-process the requisition (e.g. try again with a different item or otherwise clean up whatever the Approver didn’t like). So SpendMap will keep the budget “reserved”, to avoid that part of the budget being picked up by someone else, and therefore reduce the chance that the original Requisitioner will be “out of budget” when they try again.

But if they don’t want to try again, they can either 1) delete/cancel the requisition, or 2) there is a setting to “auto-delete” rejected requisitions after a certain number of days, which will eliminate that additional step, or if the user just forgets to cancel the Requisition. You can find that “auto-delete” setting in here…
– REQUISITIONS AND APPROVAL > Setup system > Miscellaneous settings

Reminder: Users will see rejected requisitions the next time they go into their Requisition Work Area. If you would like to be a bit more proactive, just enable this e-mail notification…

Rejected requisition email notification

Achieve Budget Compliance with Free Purchase Order Software

As a follow-up to the Success Story that we posted about Managed Care Systems last May, Eric was kind enough to send us this note…

Thanks for sharing, Eric!

Control spending to save money

Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2014 1:30 PM
To: SpendMap
Subject: Good news

The numbers are in for last year. Because of SpendMap, we were under budget for 2013 by approximately 30,000 dollars!

For the past 5 years, we were over budget every year, by significant amounts.

Just wanted to share the great news with you.

Eric Jeffers
MCS, LLC

When Purchase Orders Beat P-cards

P-Card-Trap We hear stories like this all the time. Companies get tired of the paperwork and administrative effort of Purchase Orders and so they switch to Purchasing Cards (p-cards) to make things easier.

Often the p-card programs start off well and employees follow the guidelines (e.g. only to be used for low-value purchases, etc.). But inevitably things start to “creep”, and before you know it the cards are being used to buy everything, and then you’ve lost control of spending.

But the good news is, with the free version of SpendMap, you can get the tight internal controls that can only be achieved with a proper Requisition and Purchase Order process, while significantly reducing the paperwork and administrative burden compared to your Grand Daddy’s old paper Purchase Orders.

Sometimes, when it comes to your company’s spending, there is such a thing as “too convenient”.

New Expense Reimbursement Requests in 2014 Release of SpendMap

We are happy to officially announce the new Expense Reimbursement Approval functionality as part of the 2014 release of SpendMap, which also includes more than a dozen other new features and capabilities.

Companies usually spend money in two ways; either employees process Requisitions and Purchase Orders, or they just spend their own money and expense it later. By adding Expense Reimbursement Requests to our world-class e-procurement toolset, we are empowering our clients to capture and report on all non-payroll spending in one place.

With the new Expense Reimbursement approval features in SpendMap (sometimes called Expense Management, Expense Reporting, Travel and Expense, or T&E), you can replace your paper or Excel-based “expense sheets”, to reduce paperwork, accelerate the approval process, and simplify reporting for employee expense reimbursements.

expense reimbursements and approval

Much like Purchase Requisitions in SpendMap, Expense Reimbursement Requests can be routed for online approval based on predefined business rules, to ensure that proper approvals are obtained for every expense, every time, and Managers can receive automatic e-mail notifications of pending Requests. Complete expense details are at the Approver’s fingertips, including previous spending history, up-to-date budget status, as well as a copy of any scanned receipts.

Once approved, SpendMap can send a “check request” to the Accounting, ERP or Payroll System to issue payment to the employee, with no duplicate data entry.

In addition to eliminating paperwork and accelerating the approval process, approved Expense Reimbursement Requests will update spending history, budgets, and many other areas of SpendMap.

Stay tuned for more details about the 2014 release in the new year…

Account code fields in your free Purchase Order Software

Most people who are using the free version of SpendMap want to track and report on their spending based on one or more account codes or account code “segments”, such as a cost center, general ledger account, department, business unit, project, fund, etc.

We’ve had a few support tickets from people who seemed a bit mislead by our default terminology for the account code fields. Most commonly, people are using the Project or Job Fields, when they could get more benefit using the Cost Center field instead.

So in this blog post, we’ll discuss a few options for setting up the account code fields in SpendMap. For more details, check out this section of the Online Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > Master Files > Account Coding (Overview & Guidelines)

User definable fields SpendMap includes 5 user-definable fields that can be used for coding Purchase Orders and other transactions. By default they are labeled as;

Cost Center
G/L Account
Project
Job
Request-By

But you can change the names of these fields, so please don’t feel obligated to use the default field titles.

And you do not need to use all of these fields if you don’t want to. Most small businesses that are using the free version of SpendMap will use only Cost Center and maybe G/L Account, while Project, Job and Request-By are typically only used by larger organizations with more complex account coding needs, such as larger public, government or non-profit organizations. (more…)

Budgets in your free Purchase Order Software

Caroline works at City Gate Ministries, a non-profit in Washington, DC and wanted to know how to set up budgets to keep track of spending against her grants.

However, the budgets aren’t at the “grant” level, but rather by category of spending underneath each grant. For example, within a grant, there is a budgeted amount for office supplies, another budget for computer supplies, and so on. That is, there is a separate budget for each G/L Account within each Cost Center.

In SpendMap, budgets are set up in the Cost Center Master File. So first things first, you’ll want to rename “Cost Center” to whatever it is that you’re tracking charges by (“Grant” in Caroline’s case). You can do that in here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > User defined terminology and settings > User defined field names and terminology

Then, in the Cost Center Master File, notice the three folders/tabs at the top of the screen…

Budget-Options

So if your budgets are at the Cost Center level (i.e. regardless of the type of spending), then you should be using the [Budgets] folder/tab. However, if you want to track budgets by G/L Account within each Cost Center, then use the [Matching G/L Accounts/Budgets] Tab instead, where you will be able to enter separate budget amounts for each account code.

Time-Based or Overall Budgets

Also please note that SpendMap supports both “time-based” budgets (e.g. monthly, yearly, quarterly, etc.) or, if your budgets are not specific to a time period, you can specify “overall” budgets that span all time.

For example, most people who track departmental budgets would use time-based budgets (e.g. the Marketing Department can spend a certain amount each month), whereas it’s very common to use “overall” budgets for things like projects, grants, etc., where the spending is not locked to a specific date range (e.g. a project could last 5 years).

Importing Budget Data

If you have lots of budget data to set up in SpendMap, you can import your budgets rather than keying in the details manually…
– PURCHASING > Utility > Data Interfaces > Cost Center master file > Budgets > Import Budgets into cost center master file

More Details

For more information, please see the subsection called “About cost center budgets” at the top of this section of the Online Help..
– PURCHASING > Setup system > Cost center history/budget settings

Tracking purchases by project or job in free Purchase Order Software

Jolene from Helston in the UK asked if she could track her Purchase Orders by project or job using the free version of SpendMap…

“Most of our jobs are ongoing and can take up to 6 months to complete, is there an easy way of viewing all items purchased for just one particular job?“

Yes, there are a number of ways that you can get a list of items purchased for a project or job. There is a Job Master File and a Project Master File under the Master Files menu section, so you can put your project/job numbers in there, then select the applicable number in the Project or Job Fields on the Purchase Order Line Item Details screen.

At that point SpendMap will know which project or job each Purchase Order is for, so you can sort and/or filter many reports by these fields. For example, try running the PO Listing Report for a particular project or job, using this menu option…
– PURCHASING > Reports > Purchase Order Reports > PO Listing

Again, that’s just one report that can be run by project or job but there are many others.

You can also search for Purchase Orders and other transactions on-screen using these fields. For details, see this section of the Online Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > System-Wide Features and Utilities > Lookup (Searching)

On a separate but related note, the Project and Job Fields are user-definable (i.e. you can rename the field titles), and there are also other user-definable “account coding” or “tracking” fields available in SpendMap, some of which have even more capabilities than the Project and Job Fields. So if you only need to track purchases by Project or Job but nothing else, you might want to use the (user-definable) Cost Center field, rather than the Project or Job fields, since there is more reporting available for the Cost Center Field than any of the other fields. So consider renaming “Cost Center” to “Job” and then you can use the Job Field for something else, or you can just rename it to “N/A” or “Not Used” or something if you don’t need it (you can’t have two fields with the same title).

For more details, take a look at the subsection called “Account Code Fields and Segmentation”, in this section of the Online Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > Master Files > Account Coding (Overview & Guidelines)

Have a great day!

The Free-Procurement Project

Free Purchase Order Software by SpendMap