Sachin Sharma walks through how his company ProcureDesk tracks every expense—software, contractors, credit cards—as a purchase order to forecast cash flow and enforce budget discipline. Using the product internally revealed gaps between what they built and how customers actually spend, shaping their ideal customer profile.
We obviously use procured asset procured s to manage our spending. And we do it in certain ways. Right. And that kind of helps us also understand how our customers might be facing those challenges. Right? So we are a software company. There's not a lot of material we buy. Most is software subscriptions or, you know, contractors or employee spend. So employee spend is employee spend, right? There's, you know, the payroll is payroll. But what we do with Procuredesk internally is all our spending, whether it is subscription, whether it is contractors, and so on. We put that in procuredesk as purchase orders. And the reason we do that is we use that as a cash flow planning tool. Because now we know upfront that if we have signed up for a service for, let's say, 12 months, I need to pay at least or keep in mind how much I'm going to pay. So that's number one. Number two is what we do then is at any time an invoice gets processed, right? So we, we are small for this use case, but we have forced our contractors to do it because we want to test it out. Our contractors actually go to a portal, we call it supplier portal, where they open up their purchase order and submit an invoice against it. Now, generally, we don't recommend to small companies, but, you know, and this is how I'm just explaining how we use it, right? So. And I think it took us some time to be very honest, like in. And we only started doing this in the last year, year and a half, because initially it was, you know, we were no different from any other startup in terms of, okay, spending, spending, spending, you know, focusing more on revenue and not paying attention to these things. But, you know, we used to kind of then put everything in a spreadsheet plan around things and so on, which we still do from a planning standpoint, but. But then we move that down into procarest. So that's one way to do it. Second is, you know, all the credit card spending, we kind of bring it all into Procure Desk. And so we can kind of see overall where we are spending money and so on. To be completely candid, we don't review it on a monthly basis, but, you know, because our spend is on credit cards is not that high. But every quarter we kind of look at it and said where our top spending is. So it kind of brings in a good discipline. And second is like, you know, I was, I was talking briefly about the culture previously in terms of, you know, the CEO says, okay, go ahead and buy it Right. It's not easy to just kind of stop and said, do we have you budgeted for it or not? So it's not a question of can I spend it? Right? So it's a matter of, are we following a discipline around having a budget and then sticking to the budget. And when we try to go away from that budget, let's have a conversation, right? And our conversations are not that fancy because we're a small company, but we still have this conversation and said, okay. We said, we're going to do this and this is the new thing now, first of all, what impact it has. And then second is, you know, do we have the money to do it or not? So those are the two ways we kind of think about. But honestly, eating your own dog food gives you a lot of lessons because there are certain assumptions you build a product around. And when you start using yourself and said, gosh, this is not really working because you're using it in real life. Right? It's one thing to test things out, but it's another thing to kind of test it in real life scenario. So we had a lot of aha moments doing this and a lot of like, you know, where we look at ourselves and say, why we are that stupid, why we build it that way, right? So it helps a lot. I would say every company they can, if they are in a position to use their own product for that function, I think that's a great leverage because it helps you to understand is not all your customers are exactly the same. So that brings in that perspective is like, okay, you are at a certain size and you have certain set of requirements, how well the product is aligned to that. And that also helps you to understand is, are you targeting the right icp, right? Is it built for that ICP or not? So those are a couple of aspects.
