Modern PO System Use Cases

Approvol is a cloud-based system that helps SMEs to manage budgeting and procurement processes with efficiency and flexibility

Improving Team Efficiency

Businesses and organisations use Approvol for the complete procure-to-pay processes, including setting up annual budgets, raising and approving purchase requests, receiving goods and processing invoices for payments.

Approvol is designed with budget at its heart, allowing you to gain insight of your business budget and procurement performance through Approvol dashboards and reports, thus enabling data-driven business decision making.

Approvol Can Help Your Team

The best way to explain is to walk through a few typical roles in a typical company and see how Approvol help them through their daily tasks.

The example roles are,

Laura – Product Design Engineer
Max – Product Development Manager
Tim – Financial Controller
Helen – COO
Dave – CEO

Laura Product Design Engineer

Laura is an engineer in the Product Development department. Her job is to design and validate new products. From time to time, Laura needs to purchase tools, materials, and samples for prototyping and conducting tests.

With Approvol, Laura can enjoy an easy and transparent purchasing experience.

Daily Purchases

Laura’s purchasing typically involves below steps,

Raise a purchase request easily by selecting standard items from a category or entering the exact ones she needs
Submit the request to her supervisor or the budget owner for approval
Receive notifications once the request is approved and when PO is sent to the supplier
Mark order items as received in the system when parts arrived
The next time Laura needs to buy the same items, she can simply copy the order and repeat the process again

Item Tracking

Laura is in the process of building a product BoM, and has raised multiple orders with many items. She uses the PO Item Report to have a consolidated view of all the relevant purchase orders, deliveries, and payments together. If she notices anything behind schedule, she simply goes to the purchase order and raises a query to her colleagues or the supplier. This gives Laura the ability to track the items throughout, and stay on top of her build process.

Personal Purchase Analysis

Laura is a business minded engineer, and she likes to dive into the stats of her purchases and analyse how she can help the business optimise purchasing.

In her Personal Purchasing Dashboard, she can see her purchase summary in each budget year, with top orders and suppliers listed, as well as how her purchases have gone into different projects. With this knowledge, she gets an idea which project she might want to keep eyes on or which suppliers she might have a stronger bargaining position next time.

Max Product Development Manager

Max is the Manager of Product Development department. His department tends to execute multiple projects concurrently. He is responsible for ensuring the product development projects are delivered within schedule, quality standard, and budget.

With Approvol, Max can efficiently oversee the purchasing activities of his team while keeping project spending always under control.

Budget Setting

Each year, Max completes a product development plan, and raises annual budget requests for the projects he is responsible for. The annual budget requests will then need to be signed off by the COO and the CEO. Should new revisions be necessary, Approvol's version control will track the changes made.

Once an annual budget gets approved, Approvol automatically analyses it and generates budget control limits based on either its departments and budget categories, or alternatively budget line items. The budget control limits function as boundaries in the purchasing process to help identifying potential budget overruns.

Purchasing Control

Once a member of team, for example Laura, submits a purchase request, an email notification and an in-system message are sent to Max. Max logs into the system check out the details of the request.

Approvol, at this stage, automatically presents the team with budget control limits, committed order values, and the remaining budget balance. In the case of a potential budget overrun, Max will be notified so that he can decide whether to approve the request, or query with Laura by sending her a message through the purchase request.

Once Max has approved the request, it will then submit to the next approver. Both Laura and the next approver will be notification of the progress.

Monitoring & Analysis

Throughout the year, Max constantly ensures all his projects are within approved budgets. By picking a budget stream in the Purchase Dashboard, he observes and monitors the positions of the orders, invoices, and payments against the approved budget figures in real time.

Max’s projects are of a similar nature, so they are set up with near identical budget categories. Max views and compares how the projects are performing by looking at the category distribution in the doughnut chart. For any abnormality, Max can choose to investigate further by using PO Item Report or Budget Item Report.

From using the dashboard and reports provided by Approvol, Max always has a clear and accurate understanding on how his projects comply with the set budget limits, thus providing him with full confidence that his project can be delivered within targets.

Tim Financial Controller

Tim is the Financial Controller of the business. He receives and processes invoices, compiles payment schedules, and is responsible for accounts.

With Approvol, Tim can really cut down manual steps and human errors, benefiting from system automations. He can process invoices, produce budget and spending reports with much improved speed and accuracy.

Error Free Invoice Processing

Each month, Tim and his team receive a lot of supplier invoices. In the past, they had to carry out a lot of manual checks to ensure that invoices are correct to avoid wrong payments. However, nobody is perfect - manual work provokes human errors.

With Approvol, Tim can create invoice records from either a PO or a supplier. Approvol will automatically fill in un-invoiced items on the new invoice sheet, and perform a 3-way match to ensure the ordered, received, and invoiced figures match. Approvol can detects potential issues and alert Tim, so that he can investigate accordingly.

Once all invoices are processed into the system, through the Unpaid Invoice Report Tim is able to identify all the outstanding invoices that are due soon. This helps him with scheduling payments easily and accurately.

Speedy Budget & Spending Reports

Tim's responsibilities also includes producing monthly management reports with budget and spending status. Before Approvol, he had to correlate various dates from orders, delivery notes, and invoices individually, which was time consuming, tedious, and prone to errors.

With Approvol, Tim can easily produce such reports using Budget Dashboard and Purchasing Dashboard, with fully configurability and graphical presentation. With just a few clicks, beautiful and accurate reports are made. The best above all, Tim can do so anytime and anywhere, whenever the business needs.

Streamlining with Other Packages

For bookkeeping and analysis purposes, Tim has the ability to export records and reports from Approvol, and then feed into other packages to further work with the prepared data.

As Approval performs automated checks before exporting, this gives Tim full confidence on the accuracy of the data, saving him time and effort on data validation that he otherwise would have to do.

Helen COO

Helen is the COO of the company. She looks after the overall operation of the business including budgets, cost control, and process improvement.

With Approvol, Helen can build and manage budgets with confidence and ease, and focus on driving the business towards to its profit targets.

Building and Managing Budgets with Confidence

Each year, Helen works with department leads and budget owners to shape the total budgets for the business. They include both ins and outs. With Approvol, detailed annual budgets can be submitted and approved in a single place. Revisions are tracked and traced with version control.

Moreover, throughout the budgeting season, the Budget Dashboard allows Helen to see the full picture over the budgets, along with forecast profit figures. It can even combine the budget views from different approval stages, such as merging newly submitted and approved budgets into a single view. This helps her greatly as she can immediately tell the difference a new budget will make upon approval, thus ensuring the business only commits to a total budget that works for the overall profit target.

Working Towards Profit Target

Throughout the year, Helen regularly revisits the Profit Forecast Report to see how the business is performing towards its profit target. This report gathers all the data points from monthly budgets, incomes, orders, invoices, and payments of the annual budgets to compile 3 types of profit forecast.

The first type is purely based on budget figures. The latter 2 take the actual figures from the previous month into account, and as they progress through the year, the additional data points continuously improve the accuracy.

Helen uses this report to monitor profitability performance. It gives her a real opportunity to capture potential problems at an early stage, allowing her valuable time to make necessary adjustments in order to stay on the track to achieving the profit target.

Cost Saving & Process Improvement

Businesses ride through highs and lows, but Helen is always keen to identify cost saving opportunities. From the Purchasing Dashboard, Helen can easily identify the Top Suppliers and the Top Purchasers for any given budget year. She has the ability to break down and classify large amount of purchasing data into departments, budget streams, and budget categories, in order to make comparison between budget years. This provides her with insight on where the cost saving opportunities are.

Having identified the opportunities, she can open dialogues with the top suppliers, or review internal spending profiles to understand the disparity of spending between groups.

Dave CEO

Dave is the CEO of the business and has the overall responsibility of the organisation.

With Approvol, Dave is able to cut down time spent on daily paperwork, understand the financial position in real time, and use data to drive big decisions.

Getting Back Valuable Time

Dave makes a lot of decisions each day, such as approving high ticket purchases and payments. With Approvol, it’s easier to pull all the required information from the requests together, including all its details, comments, attachments, notes, and even audit records. Related orders, invoices, and budgets are all interlinked together, easily and readily accessible. All the information Dave needs to make his decisions is at one place. No more piles of paper or endless spreadsheets to go through. Dave can see and understand the requests clearer and quicker, freeing up more of his valuable time and focus on to the important matters.

Knowing the Finances in Real Time

As the CEO of the company, Dave obviously is the ultimate person responsible for the company’s P&L. This means he is expected to have a good grasp of the company’s finances at all times. With Approvol, Dave does not need to wait for the arrival of the next monthly budgetary reports from the finance team. Instead, he simply signs onto Approval, at any time and from anywhere, and has the most up-to-date budget dashboards and reports right in front of him. The real time visibility enabled by Approvol lets Dave’s business keep a step ahead of its competition.

Decision Making Driven by Data

An important part of Dave’s job is to make big decisions for the business. Big decisions cannot be made without knowing where you stand and where the decision will lead you to. Being able to infer from the analytics in Approvol, it gives Dave a full and clear understanding on where the company stands financially at every decision point. The budgeting and forecasting tools in Approvol allow him to simulate and predict what the major investments and commitments would bring to the business. Guided by Approvol's insights, Dave’s big decisions can be made with confidence.