How Purchasing Software Drives Business Growth

How Purchasing Software Drives Business Growth

If you’re reading this guide, you’re probably looking for a better way to manage purchasing in your company. Whether you’re new to purchasing software and you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, or you need some cold hard facts to convince your higher-ups that better purchasing software is a good investment, keep reading.

Here’s how purchasing software drives business growth for organizations of any size.

What is Purchasing Software?

Purchasing software (aka “procurement software”) helps businesses control spending, drive growth, and manage every step in the procure-to-pay cycle — everything from the purchase of goods to the payment of the vendor.

Anyone involved in the purchasing process — executives, finance teams, accountants, procurement teams, employees — benefits from purchasing software. It eliminates paper-based processes and gives users the tools, modern processes, and data they need to save time and make data-driven decisions. Essentially, it drives growth and rounds out your financial tech stack.

Read More: What does Procurement Software Actually Do?

Why is Purchasing Software Important for Companies?

Purchasing software is important because it helps companies manage every aspect of purchasing and control spend. It drives operational efficiencies and optimizes company spending to generate growth.

With mobile and cloud-based access to company purchasing software, remote-based employees and distributed teams can manage purchasing while they’re working remotely on any device.

4 Reasons Purchasing Software Drives Business Growth: 

Besides making it quicker and easier for companies to purchase the goods and services they need, here’s how purchasing software can have a direct, positive impact on company growth.

1. Spend Management

Firstly, effective spend management helps organizations reduce costs, improve profits, and redirect savings to drive company growth. But businesses need real-time transparency and control over all spending before they can even think about leveraging these benefits.

This is where purchasing software comes in. The tools, insights, and reports inside a purchasing platform like Procurify, for instance, drive business growth by helping companies:

• See how money is being spend across the business in real-time
• Know where to cut, reduce, reallocate, or increase spend to increase profitability
• Track excess spending, especially with travel and expense accounts
• Redirect inefficient spending to growth initiatives
• Nurture vendor relationships to secure better pricing and sustained growth
• Make it easier for employees to stick to approved vendors and budget limits with real-time spending limits through mobile purchasing and expense management software

• Catch issues like maverick spending, duplicate or fraudulent invoices, and purchasing discrepancies before they turn into big problems

2. Operational efficiencies

Secondly, time is money.

Imagine if everyone in your company had more time to focus on strategic activities that added value to the company?

Purchasing software can help your people do just that by slashing the number of time employees need to spend on purchasing admin and getting through a long list of other operational efficiencies throughout your organization.

With a cloud-based purchasing platform in place, procurement teams can finally eliminate paper-based systems, leverage strategic sourcing to enhance buyer-supplier relationships, and set up automated workflows that reduce bottlenecks and save hours of time. Say hello to efficiency!

Team members are then better placed to make quick, approved purchase requests, and stick to company budgets. Plus, executives also have instant access to the spending data they need.

Startups and larger fast-growing companies that manage higher-than-usual volumes of spending can also save huge amounts of time with purchasing software.

It’s hard to translate all of these efficiencies into an exact dollar value, but time is the biggest resource. It’s easy to see how “less time spent on admin” can lead to higher productivity and better results. In fact, learn how Cabify, a global ride-hailing and transportation Unicorn company, did just that by using a spend management solution to improve purchasing cycle times and cut down on approval times.

3. Strategic decision making

Thirdly, executives, managers, and individual departments (e.g. Accounting, Finance, Procurement, Sales, Operations, IT) need accurate company spend data to inform big-picture planning and strategic decision making.

However, with Excel-based or paper-based purchasing systems, it’s impossible to access spend data quickly, let alone work with it efficiently or effectively. In addition, it’s challenging to rely on accurate data in these systems, let alone make impactful decisions.

Good news. Purchasing software reports spend data in real-time, which makes it a lot easier for any leader or team in an organization to:

• Access up-to-date spend data the second it’s needed to update forecasts
• Audit past spending patterns to determine areas of improvement
• Quickly report to leadership, investors, and the Board on budgets vs actuals
• Identify trends by location, vendor, person, account, or project
• Predict and take advantage of trends, such as supplier discounts or optimal vendors
• Track down excessive spending and redirect it to initiatives that drive growth
• Analyze purchasing cycle times and pinpoint bottlenecks

4. Accurate Data Collection and Real-Time Analysis

Lastly, for successful spend management,  operational efficiencies, and strategic decision making to take place, the data must be reliable, complete, and accurate. This is another indirect way that purchasing software can be attributed to business growth. These solutions accurately gather spend data from multiple sources, clean it up, and give users the tools and reports they need to make sense of it in real-time.

With all of the company’s data housed in a single, cloud-based platform, everyone in the company has a single source of truth to track meaningful spend metrics and conduct in-depth spend analysis and reporting.

Because there’s no paperwork or manual entry involved, time is saved, human error is reduced, and spend data quality is assured.

Purchasing software is essential for companies of any size

Procurify give companies the clear-cut metrics and tools they need to manage every aspect of the purchasing process and regain control of company spending, with cloud-based spend management software that integrates perfectly with any accounting system.

Want to give purchasing software a try before you make the switch? Book a free, customized demo and see how Procurify can support your business.