Control and understand procurement spend with Unit4 Financials by Coda’s Procurement module
Indirect procurement spending, or maverick spending, is a huge issue for procurement teams and remains a top priority to resolve. All procurement purchases need approval and must match invoice records for the department to maintain its bottom line.
Yet, legacy approaches to approvals require manual reviews that eat up valuable time, lack the data visibility needed for consistency and diligence, and is too retrospective for finance teams to take action on maverick spend.
In this blog, I’m going to explore why procurement teams need automated processes and an improved user experience, granted by Unit4’s Financials by Coda (U4FbC) Procurement module, to successfully manage maverick spending - a topic I recently covered in a webinar with our partners at Millennium Consulting.
Why legacy processes prevent effective spend management
Phil Leaf, Principal Unit4 Functional Consultant at Millennium Consulting, joined us in the webinar to discuss how Unit4 Financials by Coda can help with spend management.
In the webinar, Phil outlines the legacy approach:
You receive an invoice, it goes off to the budget holder to be approved, but it’s a bit late in the day for approval when you’ve already got the invoice. The idea of a procurement system is to approve the cost right at the beginning of the process, when you raise a purchase order, to establish budget accountability.
With the proper requisitioning and purchase order approval process in place, invoices can be matched up quickly and electronically. Invoice matching also ensures that adequate ‘goods received’ processes are in place and completed before payments are made.
An electronic approval process ensures that no spending occurs when the budget or invoice doesn’t allow for it, putting the brakes on maverick spend before it actually occurs.
Ultimately, the policies set within the tool will dictate approvals, but through U4FbC’s user-friendly system users can set their own policies to ensure they don’t go over their own specific budgets. Empowering users to set spending policies themselves reduces IT cost and enables much closer and more specific spend management.
How can Unit4 Financials by Coda Procurement ensure ‘committed spend’?
With visibility of budgets and purchase orders, U4FbC can automate invoice matching with a budget, and proactively ensure that your committed and approved spend never break your budget.
U4FbC’s procurement module can provide internal control through a receipting and pricing process - these controls ensure that “when the user is buying, they know how much it’s going to cost” Phil tells us.
Phil concurs that “you are able in U4FbC, because it’s a single integrated database, to look at your accounting systems and gain visibility of both spend and approved purchase orders and add the two together to get your committed spend.”
Automated budget checks will warn budget holders that certain approvals could go over budget, enabling much greater control as well as reduced manual checks. Reducing manual admin and authorization enables teams to be more productive with other higher value tasks.
In U4FbC, you can create a position hierarchy and assign responsibilities, essentially ensuring that the buck stops with the right manager. IT managers to approve IT spend, HR managers to approve HR spend, and so on. When the purchase order is approved, the order can be automatically emailed to the supplier, reducing manual tasks further.
The beauty of U4FbC is its flexibility, enabling each organization to pick and choose what workflows they automate and which they don’t.
Why not choose a third-party system?
Phil also outlines why, for existing U4FbC customers, integrating the Procurement module, rather than selecting a third-party solution, enables a better user experience. For existing users “picking up and utilizing U4FbC’s Procurement and Invoice Matching module becomes second nature” as the user interface is much the same.
“With third-party Procurement systems, you have to interface with U4FbC for invoice matching, there is a big cost with interfacing, but U4FbC can provide an integrated single system” ensuring a simpler and more efficient experience for each user.
Phil also highlights the out-of-the-box functionality and flexibility U4FbC provides: “there’s no interfacing, no bespoke development, it’s all available out-of the-the-box” as its already integrated with your financial system as an existing U4FbC customer.
Why U4FbC’s Procurement module benefits buying negotiations
Put simply, with complete visibility of spend, budgets, and buying activity, procurement managers are armed with accurate and up-to-date information, which means negotiations can be more pointed and effective.
Thanks to the integration of Finance and Procurement data, managers can analyze buying activities by item, category, supplier, location, department, time of year and other user-defined criteria.
With this valuable information in hand, they can negotiate more effectively with preferred suppliers. The available items are then published in centralized catalogues, where end users can benefit from the agreed prices and quantity discounts, to help make their budgets stretch further.
Ready to learn more?
Unit4 Financials by Coda Procurement module is the ideal way to take an integrated approach to spend management, linking up your existing financial data, such as budgets and spend policies, with your procurement data, such as purchase orders and spending activity.
This integrated approach provides a committed spend for procurement teams, and allows managers to better understand spending behaviour, reduce maverick spend, and valuably use this information to negotiate better prices.
To learn more watch the full webinar on demand with a live demo from Phil, consult our dedicated page for our Procurement module, or talk to sales or Millennium Consulting today!
