Company spending habits tend to creep up on you. At first, they seem like the least of your troubles. You can hear a far away cry for reevaluating the spend, that some other department can deal with for now. But the reality is, controlling company spend is one of the most important assets of your business.
Why is money wasted in your company? Have you ever done a spend analysis on your company? Maybe it’s time you just stop all the processes in your company and re-evaluate where the cracks in the floor are coming from. After all, you can’t keep building the house if there are cracks everywhere!
Thinking about spend brings anxiety to your chest and for a moment you don’t even breathe, that’s only because you are not sure what’s coming in and what’s going out.
Keep in mind your company’s bottom line is a factor of it’s profit. Tightening your spend gaps will keep you on this track.
5 tips on how to control your spend
Tweet This: Automating your purchase orders can save time so you have more time to spend on other aspects of your business.
1)Spend proof your PO processes
You have to know what is spent in order to control it. Identify the spend categories where there seems to be a lack of harmony. A lot of the time, spend mishaps occur because the employees don’t understand the procurement processes or they may find it time-consuming.
They might abandon your preferred suppliers because they found a better price and do not understand the costs associated with big orders when you have a special relationship with good suppliers, especially if you have a standing contract with them.
There are many good reasons why you should implement electronic purchase order software, some of which are:
- To have an easy to learn purchase order process in place that can eliminate gaps is key to controlling how and employee uses your processes.
- Approval rules can be set and every move made on the purchase is recorded so you know how to pick up where problems occur.
- Specific vendors are set and can only be changed by a finance or admin user.
Introducing our PO app, Procurementexpress.com, to your project will help your company achieve sustainable growth through efficient spend management.
“Rubbestamp.io is the easiest way to control spend in any sized organization, and even easier for all staff and employees to learn and understand!” – Luke Moon, Chief Financial Officer, RB Sellars
“Procurementexpress.com is a great simple tool for budgeting purposes. It works well for the reasons we put it in place, which was overspend. So at least now we can hold people accountable for their spend behavior.” – Monica Mathis, General Manager, Harmoney Limited
2) Automating purchase orders
Having so many things to do in a day can make it hard for you to manage your time efficiently, especially when it comes to purchase orders. Automating your purchase orders can save time so you have more time to spend on other aspects of your business. It may be a good idea to compare a paper-based system with an electronic PO system.
Having an efficient purchase order system will always help you win the day. Efficiency in the competitive modern day business environment is the deciding factor between winning or losing. A purchase order system can ensure accuracy in a repetitive task process.
Businesses must be able to respond quickly to changes in the economic and business environment. With automated purchase order software you can make changes to your purchasing processes in response to an ever changing business environment.
Instead of spending hours going through rows of filing, electronic document management can help managers track a supplier’s transaction history within a few minutes.
“Using Procurementexpress.com as a purchase ordering tool has been very easy from the get go. It is simple and uncomplicated and user-friendly. It doesn’t take very long to create a purchase order so it saves me time. Overall a good experience.” – Dwight Uyeno, SPUD
3) Why approval routing is important for your businesses
Getting approvals for anything in a company can be very time consuming. Approvers have to attend company meetings and are always hard to track down.
In business, a ‘bottleneck’ refers to a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or small number of components or resources. It is best to choose 2 or 3 reliable people that know how your business processes work to approve purchase orders. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, it usually takes a long time for purchases to be approved and if there are too many people in the process there will likely be a lot of delays. Secondly, the faster a purchase can be approved the faster the project can be completed and the happier your customers are.
With good purchase order software, purchases are run through a set approval routing process, whereby managers who make the decisions can approve all purchases with the click of a button. Reports can be reviewed in real-time and each time a purchase is made a step by step command is recorded on the PO with a time and date. Budgets are set beforehand and you are alerted when it gets close to the end of the spend budget for that project.
“We got Procurementexpress.com to handle the approval process for a 150-employee sized company. We were looking for ease of use and fast implementation. Since the adoption of Procurementexpress.com we have been able to increase the control over purchase approvals (we have not overrun budget since then), we have eliminated bureaucratic forms that required physical signatures (and most times would be incomplete) and we have streamlined the approval process” – Miguel Fernandez CFO, Dinda
4) Track spending
Learning to track your expenses is the base for strong record business keeping. Taking these steps is crucial so you can monitor the growth of your business. Managers can review purchase records quickly and easily.
With electronic purchase order software you can view the remaining budget per project at any time. A simple to use system makes your budgets transparent and you can easily track your department’s spending.
“Procurementexpress.com is very useful for us to keep track of our departmental budgets. It takes a little setting up and customizing but the Procurementexpress.com staff were very helpful with this. The interface is clean and simple, perhaps a few themes would be nice but it does the job fine. It is very easy to add custom fields to your purchase orders and to keep track of expenditure. – Russ Smith, CISO, EOL IT Services Ltd
5) Efficient processes
Data is the cornerstone of sound business decision-making. A supply chain system can deliver mission-critical information in real-time to improve decision making and avoid costly mistakes. An efficient process is designed to streamline the way that you and your team work.
When everyone follows a well-tested set of steps, there are fewer errors and delays, there is less duplicated effort, and staff and customers feel more satisfied.
Processes that don’t work can lead to numerous problems. For example:
- Customers may complain about poor product quality or bad service.
- Colleagues get frustrated.
- Work may be duplicated, or not done.
- Costs increase.
- Resources are wasted.
- Bottlenecks can develop, causing you to miss deadlines.
If you find your procurement process difficult, simplify with a more user-friendly solution. The key is to find a solution that’s easy to use and all-inclusive (one that sees all direct and indirect spend) that integrates with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This ensures that all employees have access to the right information at the right time.
“Procurementexpress.com is easy to use. Quick to learn. Has great features and works perfectly for our organizational needs. Would recommend to anyone in business.” – Dale Wood, Citipointe Church
The role of the modern day Executive has changed over the last few years. Going electronic has made it easy to access business data from anywhere at any time and it provides more in-depth visibility into key business drivers that are clear across company strategy by means of analytics and insights.
Procurementexpress.com could be your ultimate smart spend toolkit all in a convenient app. Stay on top of every aspect of your business. Try Procurementexpress.com for free today!
