Procurement & purchasing

The purchase that happened in someone's inbox

You find out what it cost when the invoice arrives.

Requisitions, approvals, purchase orders and supplier management — rebuilt so spend is authorised before it happens and you can see committed cost, not just historical cost.

How it runs today

You will recognise at least three of these.

  • Someone needs something, emails a manager, and the manager replies "fine".
  • The purchase order is created afterwards, if at all, to make the paperwork work.
  • Prices come from whatever the supplier quoted that day, not from a contracted rate.
  • Approved supplier lists exist as a document, and nothing enforces them.
  • Committed spend is invisible until invoices land, usually the following month.
The tells

Signals it is costing more than anyone has measured.

  • Budget overruns are discovered in arrears rather than prevented.
  • You pay different prices for the same item across sites or teams.
  • Maverick spend with unapproved suppliers is common and nobody quantifies it.
  • Finance and operations disagree about what has been committed.
  • You have negotiated rates you are demonstrably not achieving.
Rebuilt from the ground up

What it becomes.

Purchasing becomes a controlled path rather than a courtesy. A requisition captures what, why, for which job or cost centre, and how much — priced from contracted rates rather than memory. Approval routes by value, category and budget position, so a modest consumable does not need the same signature as a capital item, and an approver sees the remaining budget at the moment of the decision rather than a month later. The approved order goes to the supplier as a real purchase order, receipting happens against it, and the eventual invoice matches three ways automatically. The most valuable output is not the control — it is that committed spend becomes visible in real time, which is the number operations actually needs and almost never has.

What the system does

  • Requisitions priced from contracted rates, coded to job or cost centre
  • Value- and category-based approval routing with delegation
  • Live budget position shown to the approver at the point of approval
  • Approved-supplier enforcement, with a documented exception path
  • Committed versus actual spend, visible before the invoices arrive

What it connects to

  • Finance or ERP, so approved orders and receipts post without re-entry
  • Inventory, so receipting updates stock
  • The job or project system, so spend is attributed where it belongs
  • Supplier catalogues and price files

It augments the systems of record you already run. Nobody is asking you to replace your accounting package.

The first release

Where we would start, and how long it takes.

Requisition, approval and purchase order live for one category of spend in about a week, with committed-spend reporting from day one. Three-way matching follows once orders are flowing, because it needs real POs to match against.

Others in operations

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