e-Procurement 101

Control Spending with a No PO No Pay Policy

When we first started offering the free Purchase Order Software a couple months ago, I did a blog post on the use of Purchase Orders as Step #1 on the path to controlling your company’s pending.

I didn’t set out to outline a three-step process for spend control but good things do come in threes, so here’s Step #2…

Once you have a reliable and efficient system in place for staff to request items and get them approved in a timely manner and you’re using Purchase Orders to keep track of your spending, the next thing you’ll have to work on is a way to get people to use the system.  User adoption is critical to the success of an e-procurement initiative.

There are countless ways to encourage user adoption of your new Purchasing System but if I had to pick one, it would be the No-PO-No-Pay Policy.

Basically, you inform all the parties involved (end-user requisitioners, the folks in Accounts Payable and, most importantly, your suppliers) that you will not pay invoices unless there is an approved Purchase Order for the goods or services.

Harsh?  Perhaps.  Difficult to enforce?  Sometimes.  Bound to be exceptions?  Maybe.

My goal for this blog post was not to give you all the ins and outs of implementing a No-PO-No-Pay Policy, but rather just to make you aware of it as an option to help control your company’s spending.

As it turns out, a good many organizations use policies like this, so maybe it will work for you.

If you would like to learn more, just Google “no PO no pay” and you’ll see lots of information and blog posts on this topic, like this one.

Stay tuned for “Step #3” in an upcoming post…

E-procurement software vs. Purchase Order Software: what’s old is new again

A dear friend recently gave my 7-year-old daughter an Etch A Sketch.  Yup, 50 years later, in this day of handheld video games, they’re still selling those things.

As I held it in my hand and tried to show her how to draw a flower (with a big line through it…I got stuck in a corner), it occurred to me that our old favorite has much in common with today’s handheld video games; compact, portable, small controls requiring dexterity, eye-hand coordination, progression, reward for time invested, etc.

Of course, it got me thinking about how e-procurement software technology has changed over the years.

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When a PO is just a PO

We still see it from time to time; the 13-digit PO number.  You know, first you take an incrementing PO number, then you jam the date at the front, stick on the cost center or job number, and maybe sprinkle in the Buyer’s initials for good measure.

If you’re coming from a manual, paper-based process to manage your Purchase Orders, you wouldn’t be the only one to use your PO numbers for purposes other than identifying the order.  After all, when all you have to rely on to track your spending history is a filing cabinet, what other alternatives are there?

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How to get internal support for a full Purchasing Software System

We’re positioning the Free-Procurement Project as free “Purchase Order software” for a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into here but the free version of SpendMap actually includes all 12 modules, including requisitioning, receiving, supplier invoice approval, even inventory control and asset management.

If all you want to do is automate your Purchase Orders, that’s fine – just stick with the Purchasing Module.  The functionality is compartmentalized, so you don’t need to use all features/modules if you don’t want to.

But if you’re up for it, you can use SpendMap to automate everything from initial requisition all the way through to the approval of the supplier’s invoice and integration with your Accounts Payable system.  This is commonly referred to as “req-to-check” or “purchase-to-pay” (P2P for short).

If you intend to branch out into these other optional areas, however, you should be prepared to present a business case to decision makers and other departments that will be affected, such as the folks in Accounts Payable, department managers who will be approving orders online, perhaps even end-user staff members (requisitioners).

To help you get started building a business case, here’s a list of how e-procurement software can improve your business results at each step of the procurement process…

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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.