Purchasing Departments’ End Of Year Processes

The Purchasing Departments’ many processes!

Firstly we would like to wish all our clients, readers and contributors, partners and potentially new clients a Happy and Healthy New Year and we sincerely thank you for making 2014 a fabulous year for us and engaging with us.

Typically at this time of the year, purchasing departments around the world are wrapping up their activities and running various end of year reports and analysis for the various directors to review as part of the purchasing departments end of year process’s.

End of year reporting for the purchasing department

So how does a professional purchasing department prepare for the end of the year ?

We are certain you have many reports you need to run,  many projects you need to close off and plenty of managers to report too and in a world without an eProcurement system those potentially complex, difficult and time-consuming tasks can take days if not weeks to prepare for.

However if you have a good professional procurement system, like eBuyerAssist, then it only takes a few minutes to run the reports and automatically dispatch them to the correct recipient and in essence that’s one of  the main benefit of running a system like this ; the huge time saving and accuracy that can be expected are all key to a successful deployment of the solution.

End of year financial reporting can be a snap whether it’s a budget analysis,  project cost control report, accrual reporting for the finance team or simply just managing your supplier relationships and ensuring all contracts are tied up and signed off before December 31.

If you need to chase a particular order with a supplier and show it’s delivered before the end of the year those tasks are also very simple – just running a good’s receiving analysis on your outstanding orders will tell you which orders are coming in and when and which supplies you need to chase to expedite the delivery.

The end of the year is also a good time for some reflection and this leads to another key element of running the purchasing solution which is determining how efficient your buying team has been over the previous 12 months ; are there any weaknesses in your processes ? could you improve in any particular area ?  For example turnaround time from receipt of requisition through to order placement and receipt of goods – Are these key indicators up to the standard that you have set yourself and all they reaching the goals you have set your team.

This type of analysis is also very useful for the end-of-the-year as it’s possible that your buyers end of year bonus’s are directly related to how efficient they have been and by using a system like eBuyerAssist you can equate that efficiency with proven metrics from within the system and set goals to ensure their end of yet targets have been met and, where they have not been met, you can simply run out the relevant exception report showing the raw numbers.

The Purchasing Departments New Year Startup Process

But there’s more as its not just about closing off the year, its also about starting a new year, and this could mean resetting budgets for various projects, or importing a whole new set of allocated budgets across a broad range of accounting codes.  In Eyvo’s eBuyerAssist, this is simple, just update all your expense codes across the whole system by importing them from a spreadsheet ; you can do a targeted one at a time update or do a bulk mass update – what used to take half a day can now be done in a few seconds.

Its all about the Purchasing Department justifying its existence via the savings it has demonstrably made.

All these actions and analysis are available to the purchasing manager, the CEO, CFO and any other member of the executive team with the right access rights.

And finally, it allows the purchasing manager to justify his purchasing departments existence by showing the savings that have been made on a year on year basis as ultimately, the bottom line is that its a professional purchasing departments job to save the company money and our eBuyerAssist allows you to show that that has happened.

If we at Eyvo can assist you with any of your end of year reporting then please do not hesitate to contact us.