What if your P2P software was as user-friendly as bol.com?

What if your P2P software was just as user-friendly as bol.com?

Dries Van Avermaet, Director of Finance Solutions at Anchr, on how an accessible ordering system can rein in Maverick Buying.

21 juni 2024

What if your P2P software was as accessible as bol.com?

'Sure, spend 5% less'

Spend control

‘Please spend 5 percent less than last year.’ If you are a purchasing manager and work out the budget annually, such questions are certainly not unfamiliar. Every year you are asked to spend less, streamline purchase requests, and be more cost-efficient than the previous year. A tall order… and there you are. You start reviewing contracts, putting pressure on suppliers, rejecting purchase requests or cutting back where possible. Frustrated, you find that you often do not have full transparency and control over the overall procurement budget.

Maverick Buying, not without consequences

Due to the constant pressure on the ordering process, more and more employees within the organisation are looking for alternative ways to purchase services or consumables. Often these purchases take place outside the established ordering systems. When expenditures are made in such a way without oversight or control, it is referred to as ‘Maverick Buying.’ This is further exacerbated when you have a non-user-friendly purchasing system where usually only a few people in the department have received training to use it.

Although most procurement managers are aware of the issues surrounding Maverick Buying, the impact of this is still underestimated.

I identify consequences on three levels:

Financial: ranging from missing out on a purchase discount, paying with an incorrect payment term or settling at incorrect rates, to the costs of, for example, registering the often one-off suppliers and the consequences of incorrect or duplicate invoicing.
Compliance & transparency: because obligations and agreements with the relevant suppliers are hardly ever centrally documented in cases of Maverick Buying, they are more difficult to verify, and the risk of unjustified payments within that group of suppliers is the highest. Think, for example, of double payments or costs charged twice.
Organisation: silo behaviour and frustrations among employees within the organisation undoubtedly lead to inefficiencies. Especially in these times of War for Talent: who would want to work in such a context?

Maverick Buying, not without consequences

Why do you need an accessible Purchase-to-pay solution?

Go for convenience!

Typically, the solution for Maverick Buying looks to technical solutions and the easing of the required procedures. Users are pressured to follow a purchasing flow, even if it is not user-friendly, not applicable to their specific needs, and usually aligned with strategic procurement that runs through generic ERP packages.

What still receives too little attention, in my experience, is the accessibility and usability of ordering systems. Compare it to the ease of bol.com, where anyone can order the most diverse products without any ‘training’. What if your P2P software was as accessible as bol.com? A system where all employees can fill their shopping cart through an internal webshop without prior training, while at the same time, you as the purchasing manager retain full control behind the scenes. It is possible!

Bye bye Maverick Buying, hello Anchr Purchase to Pay

Thanks to a clever integration of 'this webshop' with supplier & contract management, smart approval flows – linked to automatic invoice matching & processing – and transparent budget control and reporting, you can say goodbye to Maverick Buying and finally create complete transparency and control over your spend! This makes tackling the request to spend 5% less a bit easier.

We at Anchr understand this well and have therefore developed Anchr Purchase to Pay.