Years ago when I was the Director of Purchasing at the City of Cambridge Ontario I realized I had a challenge. Every day I had a stack of purchase orders that I had to sign for items that were already bought. Everyone called it purchasing after the fact. Now we have purchasing cards that solve that particular problem.

I had previously read that the transactional cost of a purchase order was very high and I thought I would do some digging to see how I could improve our procurement process and reduce our acquisition costs. Analyzing my own department was the obvious starting point. And some people just stop there.

My next step was to engage the accounts payable department and try and determine how our workload affected them. I was able to consolidate our purchases and get the suppliers to agree to statement payments versus individual invoices. This made a huge operational difference.

Now I keep seeing organizations looking to purchase a procure-to-pay system which is great. Although, they tend to be expensive. What I don’t see that often is a focus on accounts payable (AP).

If you are looking for ideas and a more economical solution then take a look at this handout that I created on AP automation. I also mentioned a potential solution that you might want to check out.

At the same time, I would recommend talking to Philip Teri at Document Imaging Partners who by the way is a 5-star service provider. They also support M-Files.

QCsolver Inc. does plan on implementing one of Philip’s suggestions which will save us hundreds of hours of processing and reviewing time for our insurance and other certificate monitoring.

Stay tuned as we will be launching this new module in the 1st quarter of 2025.