Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, breaks down how to pick purchase order software in three steps: define your actual workflows and approval needs, filter vendors by company size and accounting system integration, then run a 10-14 day trial with real use cases. Most companies miss audit trails and compliance features, which auditors will ask about later.
Looking for a purchase order software. I know it's hard. There's so many options that's available, right. If you do search G2 or Google, you'll see hundreds of listings and you don't have time to actually go through every listing and trying to figure out what's the right solution for your company. So in this video, I'm going to give you a three simple step process to find the right purchase order software solution for your company that meets your exact needs and stick till the end where I'll share one feature that most companies forget to ask and doing that upfront could save you a lot of rework. Now, if you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Procure Desk, where we help growing companies automate their processes around procurement and ap. So let's jump right in. So number one is defining your use cases. So what do I mean by use case? Very common mistake that you see with most companies when they start looking for a solution is going and making a list of features. I need a system that can create, you know, automate my purchase acquisition process or it can generate a purchase order, send it out to the vendor, or it could connect to a marketplace or things like that. Right. The problem with this approach is you are not clearly defining how is your process working for these specific use cases or for these requirements. Those requirements are to solve a use case. So the difference between use cases, it's very specific to your requirements. So what do I mean by that? We create a purchase request where we capture these five fields based on the department it needs to go for approval to a department head based on that. If a project is selected, it should go to a project manager for approval and if it is more than $50,000, it should go to the CFO for approval. That is a exact use case you're looking for. Right. So if you define your requirement like that, it is very specific to what you need. Right. Similarly, like if you're looking for the end to end automation and not just purchasing like matching your invoices with purchase orders and receipts, clearly defining your process and how it is working right now and where you envision it or how you envision it to work, that is what the use case definition is. You don't need to spend a lot of time on that, but spend time to at least document the top three or five use cases to start with. So that's number one. So now you got your use cases. How do you figure out the right solution for you, there are three filters that you can apply to narrow down the shortlist, right? So number one is, do they do like the vendor, is this serving market like yours in terms of size? So are they for small businesses, are they for medium, are they for large, what are they for? Right. So that you can quickly figure out if that's the right solution for you. Like if you are looking for an enterprise, you know, surrender, they're not going to. And if you're a growing company that doesn't meet the requirements. So number two is do they serve your industry a lot of time? If you, if they're already serving your industry, they have already baked in those best practices that you should be using in your purchasing process. So that helps a lot when you are setting up a new system because it already have the best practices that is used by your industry. Number three is it must integrate with your accounting system. So if you're using QuickBooks, Xero, Netsuite, you name it, it should integrate with those accounting systems so you don't have to worry about moving the data manually between these different systems. Otherwise, you know, you just have one more system that doesn't talk to your, I would say system of record in this case, right? Your accounting system. So that's number two. That's how you go about shortlisting it, right? So you got your use case, you got your shortlist. Now what do you do? Of course you do demos, right? So you reach out to those vendors and you ask them to show the product. Now the problem with demos is they're just too short, right? I mean in 30 minutes how much you can make out in terms of whether this is exactly going to meet your requirements or not. So what we recommend rather is obviously do the demos to figure out whether they are in the right ballpark or not, right? In terms of feature set and pricing and things like that. But then find your top two and do it. Ask for a sandbox or a trial. Generally 14 days trial is more than enough for you to figure out how this is going to work. So what do you do with this? You figure out you have your main champion, who's the person who is. If you are the person who is evaluating that, then you should be playing with the tool to figure out ease of use and things like that. But what you can also do is invite your one or two power users so they can see the product upfront, provide your feedback. So later adoption becomes much easier, right? So that is an easy way for you to involve your stakeholders in the evaluation process. Do the trial. But in the trial go for specific details, right? Configure your use case and make sure that it's easy for you to configure it and so on so you can see exactly how it's going to work before you purchase a software. So just to summarize, here are the three step process for you to figure out the right purchase order software for you. The number one is figure out the right use cases, detail them out. Number two is shortlist based on size, industry and the system, whether they talk to your accounting system or not. Number three is ask for a sandbox and trial for let's say, 10 to 14 days. Now one of the common mistake many companies make is they don't ask for details around audit trail. So imagine you're a growing company, you have auditors who are coming in and you know, looking for, I would say controls, compliance and so on. Right now, if you don't have a good audit trail in your system from day one, this will become very chaotic process later on. So look for a system that can not only support the core features, but has very strong audit trail built in. Think about the ability to track who made the change when it was made. If a document is changed after it was approved, then you have complete order trail of all that should be captured. So if you found this video helpful, drop the word guide in the comments and I'll send you a detailed checklist that you can use to further simplify your election process for a purchase order software. Thanks again for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
