Power is nothing without control, in fact, power without control is dangerous. The biggest problem with lack of control is that you are usually only aware of it when it’s too late, just before you crash and burn.
Say someone handed you the keys for a Hennessey Venom GT, the combination of a Lotus Elise chassis and 1,244-hp 7.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8, recorded at an impressive 270.4 mph. You’ve driven fast cars before, so you jump in and off you go. Once you reach 265 mph you can see there isn’t enough road left to try and push it to the max so you apply the brakes, but they don’t work and neither does the steering wheel. Turns out that this particular build was put together by someone who was told to make something go very fast in a straight line so they saw no reason for the control aspects.
Obviously the above is an exaggeration. Nobody would make a car with no brakes and no steering. Now think of your business as a high performance car that uses fuel ( capital) to power operations (the engine) resulting in forward motion (profit). Hours are spent before each race to ensure that that your business starts with just enough fuel to go the distance but not so much that it weighs the car down. In business, this is called budgeting. The tricky part is finding the goldilocks zone between adequate funding and over budgeting. (Watch this space in the coming weeks for the Effects of Over budgeting.)
As this goldilocks zone shrinks in scope with improved budgeting tools and insights, so increases the need to control the rate at which operations (the engine) burn through capital (the fuel). Modern cars use an ECU(Engine Control Unit) to control the allocation of resources to the different parts of the vehicle, acting like a central nervous system. Modern business uses Purchase Controls to make sure that every drop of company fuel is fed to those parts of the engine that would result in the most acceleration, to make sure that nothing goes wasted.
Various forms of Purchase Control exist around the world ranging from paper and email based to spreadsheet and verbal approvals. The really worrying part is that 60% of companies out there still use excel spreadsheets or a paper based component to keep tabs on money flowing out and 30% of these businesses make spending mistakes on a quarterly basis. Only a minuscule 18% of businesses make use of a dedicated online Purchase Order system to track their company spending.
Enter the age of automated purchase approvals, Procurementexpress.com gives you total control. Whether you’re a 50 mph or a 500 mph establishment you want to stay on track, if you have control to start with, you will accelerate quicker. Seeing what your company spends and knowing what is being spent on are very different things, you can look over the accounts and say we spent this much this year, but how much of that spend was legitimate?
You’d be amazed at how many mistakes are made on a regular basis and not just by accident either. Many systems have loop holes in them that people can easily take advantage of, both internally and externally. Internally, rogue employees have had personal items purchased for them through the system, while others have created fictitious vendors and ran orders through them pocketing the cash. Looking over it down the line it all looks perfectly legit. Externally it is even worse, fraudsters are constantly coming up with new and improved methods of parting your company with its money. You may have read our previous post about how our system brought to light, a spurious invoice, that was sent to one of our clients. They would most likely have just paid it as always and never even known that they had been duped, all because the system in place was merely an illusion of control.
So before you notice you’ve been spending thousands of dollars on headlight fluid every year for the past five years, why not take us out for a test drive to stringently check those brakes and controls? We’ll give you two full weeks to throttle the hell out of it, no charge, no obligation.
