Editor’s Note: Today’s article is a guest post from Finly, an expense management and e-Procurement solutions provider. Its solution suite, FinlyFinance suite, automates business processes, such as order processing, vendor payments, invoicing, etc. Finly’s system helps to streamline purchasing processes by eliminating paperwork, providing better control over spending, and saving time and resources for procurement teams. If you or someone you know would like to become a guest contributor, please contact us at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks!
E-Procurement systems are becoming more impactful as organizations are able to adapt to new software and technology. The main reasons companies have embraced e-Procurement software are to increase productivity, provide visibility into day-to-day transactions, better control organization-wide spend, and most importantly, eliminate the entire manual procurement process.
Procurement teams tend to get overwhelmed while choosing the right e-Procurement system. This article discusses the must-have features in an e-Procurement system and gives readers more clarity on which e-Procurement software to select.
Now let’s dive into five of the must-have features in an e-Procurement solution.
- Managing Business Documents: e-Procurement software should have the ability to simplify the process of matching business documents, such as purchase orders, invoices, and payments. Any request raised through an e-Procurement system must track and reconcile the documents received against that request.
- Budget Management and Insights: E-Procurement software must be feasible to allocate budgets to a company’s vendors — location-wise and branch-wise – and monitor spend against budgets in real-time. This should allow companies to gain complete visibility into and control over their spend. With enhanced analytics and data visualization, buyers can make data-driven decisions and control their business expenses.
- Multi-Level Approval: e-Procurement systems must be highly flexible and configurable by allowing users to customize multiple levels of approval-flow based on the organizational hierarchy. Multiple levels of approval stages can be configured involving various stakeholders, like the procurement and finance teams to approve the request raised by an employee and be notified via email. The system should also be able to automate the notification reminder to approve or reject any pending requests.
- Vendor Management: e-Procurement software should also be flexible enough to categorize vendors according to cost centres, each of which can have multiple vendors with different tax and discount rates. Vendors can be grouped and managed according to the location where the cost centre is based.
- Catalog Management: e-Procurement software must allow users to organize the products in a specific way to ensure consistent and high-quality data across all sales channels. A catalog can contain details like product names, descriptions, hierarchy, price, vendor, and other related details.
Final Thoughts
A robust e-Procurement software solution can help organizations streamline their procurement processes, influence accounts payable operations, and enforce stringent policy compliance. Vendors can be onboarded seamlessly through the digital platform thus avoiding unnecessary email communications. The spending data provided by the automation tool empowers finance managers to make data-driven decisions, thereby allowing them to reduce unnecessary business expenditures.
About the Author
Tina Arora is a product evangelist at Finly. Her professional experience covers communications, digital marketing, media relations and social media strategy. LinkedIn
