Purchase Order Tracking? Spend Management That Works

You are a project manager for a corporation and the outside spend is a large part of the project budget. The contractual tool to control the relationship between your company and your suppliers is the purchase order. Purchase orders then are THE business tool that needs the best attention that companies and their vendors can pay to the process to optimize the outside spend. This article tells you what to do to receive spend management that works! What are some of the steps to take to improve the life-cycle of purchase orders?

Decentralize

A good first step to improve purchase order management is to decentralize the activity. Fire the purchasing department or at least shrink it to a monitoring role. Business units know their business best and can handle the ordering, receipt and payment approval of purchase orders.

Collaborate

The project manager knows best what is needed for their project. Vendors know best how to bid, make and support their products and services. And financial admins can work with the first two roles to handle the financial transations like issuing purchase and managing payments. Additionally, projects need budgets so these three roles are vital to the budgeting process.

Software

Software on the web is the answer to migrating from desktop tracking to full-blown system handling of project budgets, purchase order processing and expenditure management. We call it Spend Management. Our system product, PerpetualBudget.com is a web application that combines the functions of project budgeting, purchase order life-cycle management and financial controls performed by Users in Roles who work together to achieve the project objectives.

Some things to keep in mind about selecting and using software like PerpetualBudget. First the web application must live outside the corporate firewall. Corporations impose firewalls for important reasons but working efficiently with outside vendors is not one of them. Its is too restictive and administratively difficult to provide and manage secure access through the firewall. Thus, the spend management software must live outside the firewall so everyone can access it freely, although such software must also be secure. Passwords, roles and permissions are vital to ensuring the system is safe.

Another aspect of the system software is that it must allow the using Department to establish it’s own budgeting and spend structures. Company dictated budget structures never favor local departments and simply aren’t used if line organizations are ordered to use them (or nothing). PerpetualBudget isn’t expensive and allows local departments to set their own structures and provide adequate system administration with a minimum of effort. This is spend management that works!

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The web application PerpetualBudget.com is available to all evaluators at no charge and no credit card is required. We will prototype your evaluation system AT NO CHARGE.

Create Your Free Account

Create your Tracking Application here: Your Email address becomes your <username>, Your Company is a 3-letter abreviation used to track your database,Your Password must be six (6) characters minimum.

Go To PerpetualBudget.com

When you have added your Team Roles, get the mobile app for PerpetualBudget.com to add easy and convenient notifications for approvals.