In this solo explainer, Sachin Sharma – founder of Procure Desk – addresses CFOs and controllers at growing companies who struggle with employee overspending. He cites a statistic that such firms overspend by 8‑10% on average and outlines three primary causes: (1) budgets disappearing mid‑month due to lack of real‑time visibility, (2) emergency purchases that bypass normal approval workflows, and (3) unclear approval records, especially in field‑heavy operations like construction. For each cause he proposes a practical fix: implement real‑time budget visibility so spenders can see remaining funds; create a fast‑track emergency approval process with defined thresholds tied to budgets; and enforce a mobile‑enabled purchase‑order system that records what was approved before invoicing. He recaps the three actions, positions them as ways to control spend without becoming a “policy police,” and ends with a call‑to‑action to schedule a demo of Procure Desk’s spend‑control solution.
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I recently saw a stat that growing companies overspend by 8 to 10% on an average. And if you're a CFO or a controller of a growing company and you're worried about how do we stop overspending without saying no to everything. This video is for you. Because in this video I'm going to break down three reasons why overspending happens and what you can do today to stop it without being the policy police or validating each and every request that comes for spending and so on. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin. I am the founder of Procure Desk where we help growing companies automate better spend control. So let's jump right in. Number one is a common problem is budget disappear mid month, right? Have you ever seen that happens a lot, right? So you have a, you know, budget set up for, let's take your HR school and every teacher has a quarterly budget two months into when you realize they have already spent the money. Now it's not that they who want to overspend. The problem is they want to do the right thing. But they don't have visibility into what their budget is. So they're always either under correcting or over correcting trying to figure out where they should be spending the money. Right? A simple fix for this issue is having real time budget visibility. Let's say in this case a teacher puts in a request for supplies, they can see what their budget is, they can see how much they have spent and what is left. So, so they can make better decisions for the organization. Number two is emergency purchase. So it happens a lot, right? If you're in the field, let's say you're take a biotech company, you are a scientist, you need a reagent pretty quickly. You call the vendor, vendor delivers it. Now the AP doesn't know that you have already made the purchase and the invoice comes in and maybe you go over budget, right? Or overspending, that's anybody's fault, right? You can't really stop the operation from doing what they're supposed to do to run the day to day business. So how do you solve that? A simple fix for this is have a process for emergency purchase approvals. What it looks like in reality is let's say anything less than $500 you can just buy without getting any approval, right? So maybe rather than just you know, I need something now, rather than waiting for approvals, just put in the request, tie it to the right budget, buy it. So even though they are skipping the approval. In this case at least it is tied to the right budget so you can control spending that way. Number three is nobody knows what was actually approved. So what do I mean by that? We see this a lot in construction companies where let's say form is on site, they need something, call the vendor, they deliver the product receipt is generally maybe a handwritten code that gets stable to the invoice on what they delivered. So nobody has clarity on what was actually approved to purchase, what did we call in for and what was the invoice for? And that is the number one reason for overspending because there is no other document for you to match and say really what did we buy and what was the price we agreed? And is this the same price? So a simple fix for this would be to making sure you have a purchase order process. Even though they are in the field, they can use a mobile app for quickly creating a purchase order request. Put in the amount for what they are looking to purchase so that when the invoice comes in, you know what you order for. And by the way, if you're worried about going over in terms of the budget that you might have for a specific project, you can apply to a budget and control the spending that way. So just to recap, if you are struggling with overspending and you don't want to be, you know, be the policy police all the time, here's three things you can do. Implement real time budget visibility so stakeholders can take better decisions based on what is available in their budget. Number two is implement a process for emergency approvals or a fast approval process. And number three is make sure you have purchase orders so everybody know what was originally approved. Now if you are struggling with spend control in your growing company, just click on the link below and schedule some time with one of our product specialists so we can walk you through how what a good spend control process will look like. Thanks again for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks.
