5 Essential Features of Modern Purchase Order Software

If surprise expenses are causing cash flow issues or last minute requires for your finance teams, you probably need to implement a purchase order software. And in this video I'm going to give you five. Must have features for any purchase order software that you can implement to get better control over your spending and reduce any surprise expenses. And stick till the end where I'll give you one simple tip that you can implement to speed up your supplier onboarding process. Now, if you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Procured Desk where we help growing companies control spend through purchasing and AP automation. So let's jump right in. Number one is a flexible workflow engine. So what do I mean by that? As you scale your cost control process, you are looking at making sure that that the right people in your organization are approving the expenses. So think about it. Approving any large capital purchase for IT equipment or finance team needs to review any large capital spending and so on. These are examples of controls that you need to have in place. So you need a tool that can scale along with that so you have a different set of approvals based on what is being purchased and buy home. Right? So that's number one. Number two is a connected marketplace. So what do I mean by a connected marketplace? Today if you're buying from like Amazon or Staples or cgw, the process is that your employees are going to those websites, picking what they want to buy and then asking somebody in your team to actually make the purchase. That process is highly inefficient and error prone. Right. The price could change, they give you the wrong link and you know what can go wrong. A simple way to fix that is having your purchasing software with all these inbuilt punch outs is what we call them, where you can just simply go to the vendor website, pick what you want to buy and then the system smartly routes you back to the purchasing system so you can get the right approvals. Right. People are looking at it and then it goes back to those vendors and say all right, great, now ship the product. It is approved. Right? So you get the best of both worlds, you get a better experience for your employees and you get cost control. Number three is inbuilt budget controls. I work with close to 400 companies at this time and I can tell you with every single one of them they have expenses going over budget. And number one reason for that is they don't have budget controls that are proactive. They always come to know about those expenses after Somebody has spent the money. A simple way to fix that is have a proactive budget control where your purchase order system is actually checking for a do I have a budget before somebody makes purchase? So that's what inbuilt budget controls. Number four is an end to end procurement system. So a common problem with growing companies is they have different system for different steps in the process. They probably have a requisition system for creating purchase requests, they have an AP system for processing invoices, they have credit card system for processing expense reports and so on. And you can think about this as being siloed systems makes it so hard for you to compile all the information and have everything in one single place. And your team is then spending time figuring out looking up information into different systems for simple things like invoice matching. Right. So having all that in one place makes it more efficient so that your team can actually go to one place and say all right, is this invoice approved for payment is as simple as that, right? So bring everything into one system. So number five is mobile accessibility. So having the ability to do approvals from a mobile app so you're not dependent on being in one system or you know, going through your emails to do the approvals, that speeds up the process for approvals, especially for busy executives who are on the road or for, you know, project managers if you're in a construction company and so on. Right. So those are the five major features that you need in any purchase order software. Now about the bonus section I talked about. One of the main issue with any implementation of purchase order software is, is you need to onboard your vendors, you need to make sure you have the right email address, you have their W9 forms and so on. An easy way to solve for this is implement what's called a vendor portal which enable vendor self service. So vendors can go in register for themselves or they can update their existing information, they can check for the payment status of the invoices and so on and that reduce at least 80 to 90% of the work that the AP team has to do with regarding supplier onboarding. Right. So just to summarize, here are the five must have features for a purchase order software, a flexible approval workflow engine, a connected marketplace, a inbuilt budget control process, an end to end procurement process and mobile accessibility or mobile app. If you like this video, go ahead and hit 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.