For too many organisations books of paper purchase orders, piles of receipts, bank statements and even scribbled notes have been a standard means of attempting to record, reference and deal with purchases, commitments and staff expenses. Of course, there is little need to continue with these inefficient and error-prone methods in 2020!
Your staff need the ability to purchase what they need when they need it without compromising company approval policies – all the while having visibility of what is happening.
Staff will often work with at least three different types of expenditure:
1. Procurement Process for formal purchasing relationships
2. Expense Claims to deal with reimbursement of cash expenditure
3. Corporate Credit Cards – web purchases and increasingly entertainment and accommodation
WebReq purchase to pay software offers an intuitive, single software solution to cover all purchasing and procurement needs, while allowing companies to easily track commitments and expenses across projects and departments.
A Purchase Order process can cover a number of scenarios – a request for items and services to be purchased or a tendering and supplier selection. This can involve a requisition being raised, approved and the subsequent creation of a purchase order, inward goods recording and ultimately the supplier Invoice. Ideally the supplier invoice process will be dealt with via either 2-way matching (approved purchase order to the supplier invoice) or 3-way matching (approved purchase order to inward goods to the supplier invoice) and can automatically deal with exceptions and approvals.
This process becomes more complex when staff are working in different geographic locations and approvers / purchasers etc. are remote from each other.
Clearly an online, web-based solution is the most effective way to deliver these needs. WebReq has been designed form the ground up to help organisations step away from paper purchasing methods to a fully automated system.
It is often a balancing act to ensure approval rules and internal requirements are met while providing an easy, fast and efficient method for staff to record purchases and costs. The key, we believe, is to provide as much flexibility as is practical while automating as many tasks as possible, and importantly, using “invisible” rules working in the back ground that always ensure compliance. WebReq was developed with this front of mind. It is sometimes considered that requiring purchase orders is providing an additional “layer of bureaucracy” that could slow down and complicate a purchasing process. The opposite, is of course, the reality – proven time and time again, no matter the size of a business, with a properly implemented purchasing solution.
Working closely with multiple clients through the continuing development of WebReq it has become clear that a great purchasing solution should provide, as a minimum, a number of key features:
Procurement
• Intuitive web-based requisition entry – including mobile device compatibility
• Standing and recurring orders allowing for scheduled auto-creation
• Splitting of single purchase costs across multiple projects or departments
• Import of supplier item lists for accurate coding and costing
• An unlimited number of approval rules and hierarchies that may be based on one or any of:
o A purchase type
o Who is purchasing
o The project or department being purchased for
o The value of a purchase
o Budget status
A set-and-forget approval ability means WebReq always knows who must approve next
• Simple, one-click email based approval or rejection
• Automated PO creation on final approval with POs emailed to suppliers in real time
• Complete visibility of orders statuses via email notifications or quick-lists within WebReq
• Inwards goods receipting by PO line or fully receipt entire POs with a single click
• Supplier invoice creation from emailed invoice PDFs
• Automated population of invoice lines from purchase order details
• Automated Invoice approval process
• Exporting of purchase orders or supplier invoice data to your financial systems
Expense Claims
• iPhone / Android based Apps in addition to web-based claim entry
• Easy allocation of expenses to projects and purchase type
• Capture images and photos that are automatically attached to claim documents
• Automated claim details PDFs emailed to relevant parties as required
• Simple claim approval by project / department manager, specific approvers etc.
• Automatic generation of staff reimbursement invoices for export to financial systems
Credit Cards
• Automated import of card bank statements ready for allocation
• Easy allocation of expenses to the required project or department
• Ability to split costs across multiple projects or departments
• Simple approval of card transactions
• Automated creation of invoices for card provider payment
We are proud that the adoption of WebReq has helped so many organisations finally take control of their purchasing and expenses – all the while making the process a seamless and efficient one.
If you would like to discuss WebReq’s procurement solutions, or any of the other WebReq modules available please don’t hesitate to contact us.
