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Which suppliers hold more of a category than the contract allows. Which site is buying off-contract. Which category depends on one supplier with no second source. From the purchase ledger, reconciled to accounts payable.
Compare approved purchase commitments with received and invoiced amounts by supplier. This worked example reconciles open balances, separates receipt status from invoice status, and changes one invoice input.
Oct 25, 20266 min readA sourcing dashboard brings purchasing spend, supplier concentration and contract coverage into one review. Work through a reconciled purchasing example and see which sourcing decisions the measures support.
Oct 25, 20265 min readIndirect spend analytics groups nonproduction purchasing by category, supplier, and budget owner. Follow a worked purchasing example to distinguish spending changes from classification changes and preserve the accounts payable total.
Oct 24, 20265 min readA purchase order dashboard shows outstanding quantities, overdue deliveries, and remaining order value. Use line-level purchasing and receipt exports to build a checked view of what still needs to arrive.
Oct 24, 20266 min readPurchase price variance compares actual purchase prices with standard prices at actual quantities. Work through a supplier and item report, reconcile the total, and separate price effects from quantity changes and invoice exceptions.
Oct 24, 20266 min readSupplier management analytics connects service, price, and terms evidence to recurring supplier reviews. Work through a purchasing example, reconcile the figures, and turn exceptions into actions with owners and closure evidence.
Oct 22, 20266 min readA contract management dashboard compares spending, upcoming decisions, and supplier delivery results. Build a reconciled view from contract records, invoices, and purchasing exports, with a worked example and checks.
Oct 21, 20266 min readBuild a procurement KPI register that names each input, denominator, owner and approved target. This reusable layout includes purchasing rows, spreadsheet formulas and reconciliation checks for a monthly review.
Oct 18, 20266 min readSupplier risk analytics combines observed service deterioration with purchasing exposure and dependency. Work through a supplier review queue, reconcile its inputs, and separate warning signals from unsupported predictions about failure.
Oct 18, 20266 min readA finance and procurement guide to historical and counterfactual savings baselines, with a checked price-reduction example, an avoided supplier increase and the evidence needed before reporting a benefit to the CFO.
Oct 17, 20266 min readA procurement category dashboard compares purchasing spend, supplier concentration and comparable price movements. Use a worked example to separate category priorities from changes in quantity and purchasing mix.
Oct 15, 20266 min readA procurement dashboard compares purchasing spend, contract coverage, and supplier exceptions on a reconciled basis. Build one from invoice lines and receipt records, with spreadsheet formulas, a worked layout, and checks that keep separate purchasing events from being counted twice.
Oct 14, 20265 min readProcurement analytics connects purchasing records to spending, contract compliance, savings, and supplier decisions. This guide explains the files, measures, owners, and checks using a worked purchasing example.
Oct 10, 20265 min readPrice comparison analysis puts supplier quotes on a common requirement and commercial basis. Compare order quantities, discounts, freight, and coverage exceptions before choosing an offer.
Oct 7, 20265 min readSpecify a procurement analytics pilot with reviewed AP controls, match exceptions, evidence coverage and buyer tasks instead of an uncheckable dashboard promise.
Oct 6, 20264 min readBuild a supplier-category-unit-period spend view from AP lines in Excel, retaining credit notes, unmapped rows and control totals.
Oct 6, 20264 min readBuild a category management report from purchasing exports, with comparable spend, a price-volume bridge, and supplier concentration. Use the worked tables and spreadsheet formulas to turn a monthly variance into a sourcing action.
Oct 6, 20265 min readDefine an AP net-spend basis for credits, tax and foreign currency. Reconcile synthetic invoice, credit and payment views under explicit policies.
Oct 6, 20264 min readSeparate like-for-like procurement KPI movement from definition changes, evidence corrections and denominator exclusions using an explicit bridge.
Oct 6, 20264 min readFind and resolve missing or overlapping invoice-contract matches without duplicating AP spend. Test dates, categories, units and evidence completeness.
Oct 6, 20264 min readCreate a dated supplier alias crosswalk without combining separate legal entities. Reconcile AP totals before and after normalization.
Oct 6, 20264 min readMeasure the time from a submitted requisition to a purchase order sent to the supplier. Define the business-day convention, calculate approval and release delays, and reconcile a completed-order cohort with exact spreadsheet formulas.
Oct 6, 20266 min readReconcile purchase commitments, posted invoices and cash paid without adding the same purchase several times. Show partial receipts and unpaid balances.
Oct 6, 20264 min readTelecom expense reporting compares invoice charges, usage, and budget by service, location, and cost center. Build a reconciled report that separates recurring charges, usage charges, taxes, and credits before investigating exceptions.
Oct 6, 20265 min readKeep missing contract evidence separate from confirmed unmanaged purchases. Report evidence coverage and managed-share bounds on a known spend perimeter.
Oct 6, 20263 min readSupplier KPIs connect delivery, quality, lead-time reliability, and purchase cost to clear denominators. Work through one supplier's records and see which team owns each measure and its exceptions.
Oct 5, 20266 min readVendor performance analysis compares delivery, purchase cost, and quality using consistent transaction populations. Build a supplier review from purchasing and inspection exports, calculate each measure, and reconcile the totals.
Oct 2, 20265 min readUse a procurement dashboard workbook layout that separates purchasing, delivery, summaries, and checks. Follow the populated tables and cell formulas to reconcile spend by category and supplier without duplicating receipt records.
Sep 29, 20266 min readA cost savings dashboard compares purchasing costs with an agreed baseline on the same volume. Follow a worked savings bridge, reconcile it to invoices, and separate negotiated reductions from finance-validated results.
Sep 28, 20265 min readCompare approved sourcing baselines and contract terms with actual invoice lines. Work through realized price savings, contract variance and spend reconciliation without confusing volume changes with savings.
Sep 28, 20266 min readSourcing analytics compares supplier bids at the same demand, specifications, and commercial terms. Build an evaluated-cost table, check it against existing spend, and test whether a quantity change reverses the decision.
Sep 18, 20265 min readProcurement spend analysis starts with reconciled accounts payable lines and a consistent purchasing scope. Follow the export, mapping, comparison and review steps, with spreadsheet formulas and a worked example.
Sep 14, 20265 min readCalculate printing cost per page from supply consumption, maintenance, equipment charges and meter readings. Build a consistent office comparison, distinguish printed sides from paper sheets, and reconcile the result to your cost workbook.
Sep 12, 20265 min readHow procurement teams should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
Sep 2, 20264 min readThe honest answer to what share of spend procurement should manage: the 60 to 85 percent figures quoted depend on what managed means, on which spend is addressable, and on whether the figure is computed from invoices or claimed from contracts. This page gives the ranges by maturity, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one organization, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
Aug 27, 20263 min readThe complete spend under management calculation on ten payables invoices, small enough to check by hand: each invoice's supplier, category, business unit and PO reference, the contract register's in-force agreements, the approved supplier list, the bucket per invoice, on contract, approved off contract, or unmanaged, the share by category and by unit, the uncategorized invoice that is its own finding, and the identity that the three buckets sum to total spend, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own payables export.
Aug 24, 20263 min readThe ten KPIs a procurement function should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: spend under management by invoice, contracted share against actual spend by category, maverick spend by requester, savings realized against savings claimed, suppliers per category and the tail, payment terms compliance, supplier performance against own baseline, contract expiry coverage, price variance on like items, and supplier concentration. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
Aug 16, 20264 min readPurchase price analysis compares historical buying prices with current offers on reviewed units and commercial terms. Build a supplier, quantity-band, and period review that separates price evidence from changes in purchasing patterns.
Aug 10, 20265 min readSourcing KPIs connect event speed and supplier participation with awarded prices and actual invoice savings. Work through a sourcing scorecard, reconcile the savings gap, and assign each measure an owner.
Aug 4, 20266 min readProcure-to-pay analytics measures elapsed time and exceptions from approved orders through payment. Build a supplier and business-unit comparison from dated exports, with spreadsheet formulas and a reconciliation.
Aug 2, 20265 min readBuild a purchase forecast from supplied demand, inventory and lead-time assumptions. Compare it with purchase orders and receipts by item and supplier, with checks that distinguish quantity, timing and mix.
Jul 30, 20265 min readHow a procurement team counts active suppliers per category from the purchase ledger, values the long tail in transaction cost rather than spend, finds the suppliers with one order a year that a contracted supplier could cover, and separates the tail worth consolidating from the specialist suppliers the tail is hiding.
Jul 28, 20262 min readThe ten questions a CPO puts to the category managers, how much spend do we actually manage, where is off-contract buying coming from, did the savings reach the ledger, how many suppliers are in the tail and which to keep, are we paying to terms, where is single-source risk, which suppliers are slipping, is the contract price being applied, which contracts expire when, and what changed, each with the computed table from the payables ledger and the contract register, the identity behind it, and the answer a CPO should not accept.
Jul 28, 20263 min readHow a procurement team measures spend under management from the payables ledger and its own sourcing records: spend on contracts procurement negotiated, spend on cataloged or approved suppliers, and spend that reached payables without procurement's involvement, by category and by business unit, why the third bucket is where savings claims fail, and the identity that ties the three to total third-party spend.
Jul 27, 20263 min readPrice analysis compares quoted totals on equivalent terms, while cost analysis examines supplied cost components and profit. Work through the same supplier quotes both ways and see which questions each method can answer.
Jul 24, 20266 min readSupplier diversity analytics compares purchasing by supplied, verified classifications. Work through spend reconciliation, overlapping classifications, business-unit comparisons, and the treatment of missing or expired evidence.
Jul 24, 20266 min readHow a procurement team, or the finance team checking it, measures whether a claimed saving reached the ledger: the baseline price per item before the sourcing event, the contracted price after, the invoiced price actually paid per line, the volume that moved to the contracted supplier, savings claimed against savings realized per category and per project, the leakage between the two by cause, and the identity that ties realized savings to the difference in what was paid.
Jul 23, 20263 min readABC supplier analysis groups suppliers by their share of annual purchasing spend. Build a ranked table from accounts payable records, apply explicit cutoffs, and reconcile every tier to the source total.
Jul 17, 20266 min readHow a procurement or treasury team measures actual days to pay against the terms in each supplier's contract, from the invoice and payment ledgers: the suppliers paid well before terms, the working capital that early payment ties up, the suppliers paid late who are charging for it in price, and the identity that ties the days-to-pay figure to the payables ledger.
Jul 14, 20263 min readWhy category-level compliance figures hide the real finding, how a procurement team breaks off-contract spend down by site and requester from the purchase ledger, the three patterns that account for most of it, and the conversation each pattern needs.
Jul 11, 20263 min readCost per purchase order divides procurement processing spending by the purchase orders handled in the same period. Calculate it by business unit and processing route, reconcile the cost pools, and separate a process difference from a change in order mix.
Jul 9, 20266 min readProcurement cost analysis compares purchase prices with freight, handling, and transaction costs on the same basis. Build a supplier comparison from purchasing exports, apply exact spreadsheet formulas, and reconcile the result to its source records.
Jul 8, 20266 min readBuild a supplier performance dashboard from receipt, inspection, and invoice exports. This guide gives the layout, spreadsheet formulas, a worked comparison, and the checks that keep the totals right.
Jul 1, 20266 min readAnnual ordering cost is the number of orders placed during a year multiplied by the processing cost of each order. Work from purchase-order headers and an agreed cost rate, compare purchasing frequencies, and separate released capacity from cash savings.
Jun 28, 20266 min readHow a procurement team measures contract compliance from the purchase ledger: spend by supplier against the contracted share per category, off-contract purchases by site and requester, single-source exposure, and the reconciliation to accounts payable.
Jun 25, 20263 min readSupplier evaluation compares evidence against criteria agreed before a sourcing decision. Use purchasing, receipt, and quality exports to calculate scores, check the weighting, and document the human judgment behind an award.
Jun 18, 20266 min readReview a supplier's liquidity, borrowing and cash-flow trends alongside your purchasing exposure. Use a consistent statement workbook to identify the questions procurement and finance should resolve before increasing commitments.
Jun 14, 20265 min readNormalize comparable supplier purchases to an approved reference unit before interpreting case-price changes or estimating a fixed-quantity scenario.
Feb 22, 20253 min readSeparate incomplete requests, review waits and returned requisitions before comparing approval turnaround or current open ages.
Feb 17, 20243 min readSeparate registration information waits, review decisions and supplier-master activation from first purchase or delivery timing.
Feb 19, 20223 min readIdentify dated purchase-order sequence exceptions while separating timestamp problems, approved exceptions and unresolved policy evidence.
Jul 21, 20194 min readBuild a traceable invoice candidate review that distinguishes repeated imports, legitimate recurring charges and unresolved document similarities.
Apr 7, 20163 min readSeparate invoice price, receipt quantity and document-link exceptions so a procurement review explains what evidence each discrepancy needs.
Jul 21, 20064 min readSupplier share of wallet analytics. Where your spend goes, against where it was contracted to go.
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