In this solo presentation, Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, explains how finance teams in growing companies waste about 12 hours a week on manual receipt handling, approvals, and invoice processing. He outlines three clear indicators that a company has outgrown manual procurement: (1) a slow, email‑ and Slack‑driven approval process, (2) duplicate purchases and policy violations due to lack of enforcement, and (3) no visibility into committed spend, leading to surprise invoices and cash‑flow planning problems. For each sign he offers a practical fix—implementing a structured approval workflow, adding procurement guardrails or a virtual assistant to enforce policies, and deploying a central dashboard that tracks purchase‑order commitments. He also provides a downloadable cost‑time calculator (linked in the video description) so viewers can quantify the hidden cost of their manual processes and justify investment in automation. The video ends with a brief recap and a call to subscribe for future content.
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Finance teams in growing Companies spend approximately 12 hours a week chasing down receipts, getting approval done for invoices and, you know, so that they can pay the vendors. Now, if your team is drowning in emails and spreadsheets, then this video is for you. In this video, I'm going to show you three signs that your company has outgrown your manual processes. And I'll show you a simple fix on how to solve those challenges. So stick till the end. I'll also show you a quick assessment tool so you can understand what is the cost of your manual processes. So you can use that to either justify the cost of investing in technology or at least, you know, increase the awareness within your company. So if you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Procuredesk, where we help growing finance teams control spending through automation of purchasing and AP processes. So let's jump right in. Sign number one, you have a slow approval process. So either, you know, picture this, people are sending emails every day to get approvals done, or they are chasing people through text messages or Slack and so on so that invoices or purchase requests can be approved. Now this is a common scenario which we see with growing companies, right. As you scale with close to 50 people, a manual process doesn't scale very well. And the first sign that it is not working is a slow approval process. A simple fix for this would be to put a structured process for approvals. So what I mean by structured process, it could be a simple requisition form, it could be a system like Procure Desk, but it's more structured. Right? Everybody knows they need to go and follow the process rather than everybody doing their own thing via Slack, text messages, email. So get out of emails and spreadsheets and have a more structured process for approvals. Number two is you're seeing more signs of either, I would say duplicate purchases. People are buying the same item across multiple departments. Very common when you don't have a process or they're not following your policies around your preferred vendors or getting approval done before making the purchase and so on. All these are signs that they are either you don't have a purchasing policy or if you have a policy, there is no enforcement of that policy. So a simple way to fix that is having some sort of guardrails in the structured process that you're putting in. Right? So it's basically having a virtual procurement assistant that can guide people through, hey, this is what you're supposed to do. This is what the policy is these are my preferred vendors. Now, you could do this in one of two ways. You could have a person who kind of receives all the requests and then, you know, guided to the right vendor. Or you could use technology to automate that. Number three is you have no visibility into your committed spend. A common problem you would see here is you have surprise invoices coming in at the last minute, which are always due now. Right? So you know what I'm talking about. So a problem which is caused because of this is poor cash flow planning. And if you're a growing company, you know, cash flow is of course very important, right? You're not sitting in a lot of cash, so you need to exactly know when something is due and how you're going to process it and so on. So a simple way to fix that is having a central dashboard where you can see all the committed spend in terms of a purchase order process. Right? So if you have a purchase order process, you have your committed spend. You know what is already invoiced and what is yet to be invoiced. You can use that information to plan and bring it all together. So at any time, you can see exactly what you're looking for. Right? So those are the three signs that you have outgrown your manual procurement process and how to fix it. Now, as far as the bonus is concerned, I have added a link in the description below. You can download the calculator and actually see how much time you're spending on your manual process and what is actually costing you. Right. So just to summarize, you know, three signs that you have outgrown your manual process. One, it's slow. Two, you're seeing increased spend errors or policy violations. Three, there is no visibility into your committed spend. So if you like this video, feel free to hit the subscribe button so you get notified when we release videos like this. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
