Welcome back to Sudozi’s Strategic Procurement series! In our first post, we covered the importance of building a data-first procurement process. From working with dozens of finance and procurement professionals, we’ve identified three key pain-points that ultimately hinder a company’s ability to make strategic decisions in the Procurement process.
“Is this request in budget?!”
Getting relevant budget context is hard, and often takes precious time digging to get the right cut of data. But without relevant budget context, how can Finance make strategic decisions on purchase requests?
The emphasis in today’s Procurement tools is singularly focused on workflow automation, rather than empowering teams with the data and AI insights to help inform the process. As a result, Finance and Procurement teams are unable to make truly informed spend decisions without spending days or weeks sifting through financial data.
At its simplest, a Finance team cannot easily determine if a request falls within budget. Common issues include:
- Existing spend that already happened isn’t updated in the budget
- The request is for a vendor that hits multiple budget categories
- The request is cash basis whereas the budget is accrual
- Budget is at a GL or category level, but the request is for a single vendor
To attempt to answer such questions, a Finance team is required to navigate across spreadsheets and/or planning tools, filter the data down to the correct dimensions and manually compare the request. This manual process is both painful and prone to error.
Closing the Gap between Insight and Action
A proper strategic procurement process will ensure that reviewers are armed with real-time budget insights to ensure a request falls within budget: closing the gap between insight (“how much budget is left for Marketing software this quarter?!”) and action (“should I approve or reject this request?”).
With access to real-time actuals, budget data, outstanding requests + approved requests, and committed spend (contractual data), Sudozi empowers Finance with full visibility into spend directly at the point-of-review.
Sudozi is the only truly Strategic Procurement solution automating workflows that is purpose-built to arm teams with insights to make informed business decisions, fully aligned with a company’s profitability goals.
Closing Thoughts
Teams need to arm finance approvers and procurement with instant budget insights, directly on the review workflow, to ensure budget discipline. If this is not accomplished, then there are two possible outcomes:
- Teams do not conduct a formal budget check review and budget is ultimately breached.
- Teams waste hours when reviewing a request and are forced to manually navigate spreadsheets to determine how much budget is left.
Neither of these outcomes sound very strategic to us!