Executive Briefcase Guide: Purchase-to-Pay

Getting a handle on how your organization really buys and pays for indirect goods and services, this executive Briefcase Guide presents five fundamental questions every CFO should ask about their organization’s purchase-to-pay process in order to drive savings.

After payroll (and direct materials in the case of manufacturers, distributors, and retailers), the biggest source of cost in almost all organisations is the procurement of the expense items, outside services, and capital items needed to support your operations – the items that present the “cost of doing business”.

As CFO or a senior financial manager, you may not be directly involved in the procurement process on a day-to-day basis. You won the Accounts Payable part of the process, but you probably have a manager who handles that; and others in your organisation are responsible for strategic procurement functions such as identifying preferred suppliers, negotiating contracts, and monitoring supplier performance.

But with so much expenditure and organisational resource involved in the daily Purchase-to-Pay cycle, you know there must be an opportunity for savings you can’t ignore. You know that if you can improve that process, you can improve the bottom line. The question is just “where to start?”.

This guide has been developed to give senior financial managers a practical way to get started in the pursuit of the savings that are found in the Purchase-to-Pay cycle for most organisations. Specifically, it is designed to help you:

• Get a handle on how things are really done today
• Identify where the savings opportunities lie
• Start a dialogue among key managers
• Develop a vision of how to address the problems and opportunities
• Gain a general view of how a good Purchase-to-Pay software solution can help you do that better, faster, cheaper