Are you looking for an easier way to manage price quotes from your suppliers? Tired of all the phone calls, emails and spreadsheets?
The Request for Quotation Module in the Pro Version of SpendMap makes it easy to get up-to-date pricing and encourages competition between your suppliers so that you get the best possible deal.
Check out our new video tutorial, below. Or better yet, take a free test drive of our Pro Version and see for yourself.
We’ve been getting quite a few questions about the differences between the Free and Pro Versions of SpendMap, so we put together this little video for you…
You can try our Pro Version in the Cloud here.
And you can download a copy of the Free Version here.
Are you looking for an easier way to approve your suppliers’ invoices for payment? Tired of all the paperwork, phone calls and emails?
SpendMap’s Invoice Approval and A/P Interface Module really simplifies the process.
Check out our new video tutorial, below. Or better yet, take a free test drive of our Pro Version and see for yourself.
If you’re using SpendMap’s Invoice Approval Module to simplify the approval of your suppliers’ invoices, things are going to get even easier with the upcoming 2017 release of SpendMap. Stay tuned for more information and official release dates.
SpendMap now supports Prepayments, such as deposits and progress payments, to authorize payment to a supplier before the products or services have been delivered.
SpendMap will keep track of the outstanding prepayments when processing subsequent invoices for the Purchase Order, to make sure that you pay the correct amount in the end.
Check out our new video tutorial on Prepayment Invoices and don’t forget to follow this blog (see right sidebar) to be notified when the new release is ready.
Interesting data from Spend Matters and American Productivity & Quality Center,
If we’re crunching the numbers correctly, automating your procure-to-pay process can:
As if you needed even more motivation to implement our 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!
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
Managed Care Systems (MCS) was struggling to control their Purchasing, inventory and budgets with a patchwork of outdated systems. Having grown to over 300 employees, MCS was overdue for an upgrade. Unfortunately, there was no budget for a new e-procurement system, but that didn’t stop Eric Jeffers, who is responsible for the Purchasing Department at MCS.
“Our old system was written in-house a bunch of years back and it was starting to fall apart,” says Eric. “The IT Department didn’t want to invest resources to fix it, so we kept limping along. Plus, as an add-on to the Help Desk system, it was really just an over glorified word processor to start with; it could print a PO and keep some history, but there was still a ton of manual effort and duplicate data entry for each order, and it didn’t track inventory or provide any budget controls, which were big problems. We were constantly going over budget because the managers who were approving orders couldn’t see the status of budgets real-time. And we were running out of stock all the time, which meant a big panic, rush orders and extra charges for expedited deliveries”.
So when Eric found SpendMap with its real-time budget and inventory controls fully integrated with its world-class Purchasing functionality, he was optimistic to say the least. “I have been working in Purchasing departments for 15 years and this is by far the best purchasing software I have ever seen,” says Eric. “You can’t imagine how disappointed I was when I was told that we had no budget left for a new system and I had to wait until the following year”…
This new video tutorial shows you how to quickly and easily approve supplier invoices by matching them to Purchase Orders and Receipts already in SpendMap (three-way matching).
The video also reviews Invoice Discrepancy approval and Non-PO Invoices as well.
Click the image below to watch the tutorial on YouTube, and don’t forget to visit our Channel to see 15 other video tutorials that will help you get started with the most popular features in your free Purchase Order system…
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…
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.
The Free-Procurement Project 