Sachin Sharma, founder of ProcureDesk, says companies should ditch spreadsheets for purchasing when they hit three thresholds: more than 50 purchase orders per month, over 200 invoices monthly, or email approval bottlenecks. Most firms regret waiting to automate.
If you're using a spreadsheet for tracking your purchasing, you're not alone. And there's no problem with using spreadsheets. Most companies do. The problem is you should know when to move away from spreadsheets into a more automated purchasing process. After working with close to 500 companies, I've seen the clear signs when companies should move away from spreadsheets into a more automated purchasing process. So in this video I'm going to talk about three signs or three signals you should look for when you which clearly tells you that you are ready to move away from spreadsheets and stick towards the end and I'll share the number one comment we hear from most companies when they transition from a manual purchasing process to a more automated process. 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 companies control spend through purchasing and AP automation. Let's jump right in. So number one is if you are creating more than 50 purchase orders a month, it's time for you to move into a more automated process. Why 50? Why not 10, 20? I think in our experience what we have seen is when you get to 50 purchase orders a month, approximately 13, 14 purchase orders a month, right? You start seeing the impact of manual process that doesn't scale. So what are the things I'm talking about? Your spreadsheets are outdated receipts. There's too much, I would say frequency of changes that's happening. For example, I need to change the item that I ordered or somebody needs to change the delivery date so the spreadsheet gets outdated pretty quickly. That is why, you know, above 50 it is very hard to scale a purchasing process with a spreadsheet. So that's number one, right? Look for 50 purchase orders or more. That's your sign to move to an automated purchasing process. Number two is if you're processing more than 200 invoices a month, that is the volume where your AP team is not able to scale your process because they have to continuously chase down people on hey, did you order this? Who ordered this? Is it approved? I need to send an email for approval, then I need to track it and so on. And since the purchase order data is in a spreadsheet, they are unable to match it automatically. That means there is manual work required by AP team to process those invoices manually. Look up the spreadsheets and guess what? If the spreadsheet is not updated, you have the same problem in terms of like not data is Outdated, you're not able to trust the data. Hence the matching process doesn't work. So that's number two. If you have more than 200 invoices, it's time to automate the process. Number three is email delays. So if you're using emails for approvals, you will start seeing the obvious signs of that email approval is not working. Generally you will hear comments like, hey, I sent this invoice for approval, I've sent three reminders, that person hasn't approved it, or my manager is on vacation or my manager is traveling, they are not able to approve the invoices and things like that. Right. And that is not just a bottleneck for your purchasing process, but look at the second level consequences of this, which is impact on your customers. So this is the time when purchasing is not just a bottleneck for buying the material, but you're buying it for a reason, that is to service your customer or control and operation or anything like that. Right. So those are the three areas. Now, regarding the number one comment which I talked about, we hear from everybody, which is mostly in something in the lines of I wish we would have done this sooner, right? Or six months earlier. So that is the power of automation, is it not only automates the process, but it opens up the, I would say the bandwidth for your team so that team now can focus on more value add activities. So just to summarize, if you're still using spreadsheets, these are the three signs that it's time to move away from spreadsheets into a more automated purchasing process. Number one is creating more than 50 purchase orders a month. Number two is processing 200 plus invoices every month. Number three is you're seeing a lot of chatter around delays in approval because of emails. Now if you're still using a manual purchasing process, drop yes in the comments. If you like this video, feel free to subscribe so you get notified when we release videos like this. Thank you for joining me today and till the next time. See ya.
