Procuring goods and services is a vital aspect of any business, but there needs to be a way to efficiently manage the procurement process.
Effective management enables the finance team to ensure compliance over all business departments, whilst eliminating expensive errors.
To manage how your business purchases goods and services, it’s a good idea to incorporate a payment solution for procurement.
But how can your business utilize this payment solution to gain a centralized view across company spend?
How to begin
Your accounting team will be able to connect to any already existing procurement system to create an automated and seamless workflow from the initial purchase order (PO) to payment.
Once connected to your procurement system, approved purchase orders will automatically create a virtual card embedded with spend policies and data from the PO.
It also allows buyers to make in-person payments, ensuring spend compliance across any PO.
With all procurement payments accessible from a centralized payment platform, it creates visibility, payment flexibility, and control across teams during each procurement stage.
But what are some of the best steps to expertly implement this into your business?
1. Identify business needs
The first step of any process should be to identify what you need to procure, with input from both management and employees.
There will be various departments within your business where there’s a need to purchase goods or services to work well, so it’s important to identify what will most effectively benefit your business.
2. Purchase orders
Your finance team will decide which sourcing requisition requests should be approved, using business policies and other requirements.
Once analyzed and accepted, they will then choose a supplier and create a purchase order, where you’ll receive the goods from your vendor.
An invoice will also be sent, so any issues can be recognized and dealt with before the next step.
3. Payment
Once goods have been physically checked to ensure they match the PO, it’s time to pay the vendor.
It’s important to match the invoice and input the transaction into your accounting system.
Once these vital steps have been followed and the simplicities have been implemented, you can go on to incorporate ways to further improve the use of the payment solution for procurement…
Think about invoice management
There will be a range of different invoices that will have to be managed once all goods or services are received and for effective bookkeeping, every invoice has to match the correct transaction.
Manually carrying out these processes can consume a lot of time and delay payments to vendors, potentially risking your supplier relationships.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to automate invoice management to automatically match receipts with payments.
How to save time
The process of approving requisitions can take a long time, but communicating your procurement policy with stakeholders can save time, so they’re aware of what’s allowed.
Upgrade to digital resources
Paper orders and receipts are a definite way to restrict business productivity, so it’s a great idea to move to digital upgrades, like e-receipts.
E-receipts can be collected using mobiles and matched with the right transactions with ease.
As a sure way to increase efficiency and transparency, using an expert payment solution for procurement will streamline procurement and reduce costs, allowing your company to operate as productively as possible.
