Procurement software is a type of enterprise software that helps a company in organizing its buying activities and procurement process. It is a program or suite of programs that guide a company to automate the operations of acquiring supplies and keeping track of inventories.
With procurement software, you can generate purchase orders, complete purchasing procedures online, match invoices to items received, and pay all bills electronically. Issuing and evaluating tenders, clearing purchase orders, and choosing and buying a product or service are all software functions.
Basically, a well-written procurement software may do the following tasks:
- Create a new purchase order based on the requirements, with feedback from the relevant employees.
- Check a purchase order for line items that need to be filled up by a vendor.
- Submit an outstanding sales contract for review and approval to the appropriate people.
- Automate the transmission of computerized purchasing orders.
- Remind people to confirm recent purchase orders by sending out reminders (or confirm recent cancellations).
- Maintain an adequate inventory of products to avoid shortages on the spot.
- Complete financial and inventory-related activities as materials arrive.
- To optimize or enhance profitability, gather data, and evaluate patterns.
- Streamline and standardize administration across different platforms.
How Does Procurement Work?
Organizations may use a digital procurement solution to simplify, automate, and enable workers to request purchases from anywhere. Employees will be able to communicate with your procurement team quickly and accurately on what they want and whenever they need it, whether they are working at a sales office on a desktop or in the fields on a smartphone.
How Can You Benefit from Procurement Software?
When you’re a tiny business or a growing business, that doesn’t imply you don’t buy products or services. You’re still in charge of purchasing in the firm; it’s simply not a formal or centralized job.
The office staff or the production manager may be in charge of purchasing. So, how do you know when it’s time to engage someone to help you codify your procurement strategy?
Procurement and purchase are two terms that we use interchangeably. They are not identical, yet there is no linguistic uniformity among firms. The procurement department’s primary responsibility is to consolidate buying operations for convenience and accountability. Here are some reasons why your finance department needs collaboration with procurement services.
- Automate and streamline your purchase procedure
Having a procurement team will help you simplify your company’s purchasing process. After you’ve taken control of the purchase process, you can begin tracking its performance. The process owner might also search for areas that can be improved. Your purchase process and the implementation of your purchasing policy are inextricably linked. The easier something is to embrace, the better.
- Getting better prices through negotiation
The purchasing team can use volume leverage to discount better terms by examining purchase data, commonly known as Spend analysis. It is feasible to take advantage of volume discounts on commodity products. However, if you don’t buy a lot of particular commodities, your leverage may be limited.
You may take advantage of cooperative purchasing, which allows you to pool your purchasing power with that of other businesses to get a better deal.
- Keeping money from leaking out
Once you’ve negotiated the savings, you’ll need a system in place to guarantee that your employees are buying from the contract you’ve negotiated. Simply negotiating a low price does not guarantee that you will save money.
- Avoid procurement scam
Fraud is rampant in all businesses, and procurement is unable to stop it. Your procurement staff, on the other hand, can assist you in increasing buying policy compliance and preventing procurement fraud. When procurement has more information and analytics about supplier evaluation, they can devote more time to offering strategic guidance to the company and ensuring its long-term success.
Why Your Firm Needs a Finance and Procurement Collaboration?
Although it may appear that having your finance and procurement departments cooperate is a no-brainer, many times, these two departments lack the necessary tools for smooth cooperation or are unaware of how critical it is for them to collaborate regularly. A strong partnership between the buying and finance departments is critical to a company’s success.
That connection is necessary for process efficiency, team organization, strategic leadership, and determining when and how to invest in technology. Finance departments were formerly seen just as the organization’s accountant, but corporations have learned that this department is critical to their long-term performance, and CFOs have risen to become the second most powerful person in the company behind the CEO.
CFOs have begun to devote time to developing a deep knowledge of the markets beyond the basic requirements of the finance job and are no longer simply accountants.
The role of finance and procurement is to support strategic financial management operations such as yearly budget formulation, financial planning and cash flow, and reporting. When these two departments work together, they may better organize and maintain complete financial and procurement files, as well as verify that every recording meets audit, corporate, and client standards.
Questions That Finance Teams Should be Asking Themselves
Having a single, centralized buying center is important in every sustainable and scalable organization, regardless of industry. It not only makes life simpler for all of your workers and vendors, but it also provides you with the capabilities to assess current product expenditure and budget, guaranteeing financial stability and promoting development.
Your finance team must ask themselves these six questions:
- How can I make my purchases more centralized?
- How can I get a better picture of my spending?
- How can I make my approval process more efficient?
- What is the best way for me to find the greatest rates for my products?
- What aspects of my purchasing process can be automated?
- How can I make my procurement process more efficient?
In 2021, the procurement software product market is expected to generate $5.94 billion in total revenue. In the following years, the market is expected to develop slowly but steadily, with a consistent annual growth rate of 2.3%.
However, there are often these barriers when talking about the collaboration between finance and procurement software.
- Trust
Many financial departments doubt the procurement department’s ability to execute their job appropriately and effectively.
- Mindsets of the Past
Many individuals are afraid of change and question why they should change their methods of doing things. This is true for organizational departments as well.
- Communication Gaps
Most departments in a company stay to themselves, questioning if it is required to communicate with other departments to succeed.
- Service Excellence
Another obstacle to collaboration between an institution’s finance and procurement departments is apprehension that the other will bring value to their job.
Although many finance professionals may believe that procuring money in financial administration will make their work less important, this is not the case. The procurement department can only benefit the finance department if they work together seamlessly.
Finance’s involvement in procurement has grown, necessitating coordination between such two departments. Improved savings, more detailed insights, sales forecasting planning, a better grasp of the vendor environment, better decision-making, and fewer time-consuming procedures result from interaction among finance and procurement divisions.
