If you have any questions feel free to contact the support team or myself for further details.

The winner of the Kindle was Lizzie Pratt from Chapel Down Wines.

Chapel Down Wines are a multi-award winning winery based in Kent in the south of England. From their state of the art winery at Tenterden they produce quality sparkling and still wines from handpicked grapes. The wines produced there can be found in bars, restaurants and wine stores in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, throughout the UK and also at their own online store.

So what’s new in 7.5?

E mailing of documents. Before you had the option to store them, now you can send them on with the Purchase Order. By default any uploaded documents won’t be sent, but simply tick the box to allow them and off they go to the supplier. Very handy if you’ve complicated instructions to send or signed contracts that need to be part of the supporting paperwork.

Goods Received Not Invoiced report. Possibly the most requested report ever, and it’s now available. From a single click you can see all orders that have been completed but are without a corresponding invoice.

View POs from the search screen. If you’ve ever searched through 10 very similar POs this will help save time – you can click the print icon and display the PO in a new window before opening it to see if it’s the right one.

Better compatibility with mobile devices. Many of the pop up windows used to select data have gone and have been replaced with much smoother selectors. Hopefully this will end the JavaScript issues that plagued every minor release of Firefox!

As always the new version is a free upgrade – these are never charged for – and we’ll be contacting everyone about the release data later this week. All the changes are enhancements and as such won’t change any data currently in the system.

The seminar starts at 1630, you can get more information here

http://www.corkenergyexpo.ie/seminars

Its taking place on 28th September 2011 at 1400 BST, if you’re in the process of looking into SaaS Solutions or want to get the most from your current SaaS suppliers it’s well worth registering for this.

You can register here

This year we’ll be taking part of the Energy and Facilities Management expo in the Silver Springs convention centre in Cork on the 27^th and 28^th of September. We’ll be on stand A10, just next to the main entrance. If you’re interested in how PO software can help save money this would be a great time to have an informal chat with one of us about costs, implementation times and expected return on investment.

So what’s EFM expo all about? Taken from the web site:

“EFM Expo (The Southern Energy and Facilities Management Exhibition) is designed to put decision makers from the industrial, commercial and public sectors, located in the southern half of Ireland, as well as those responsible for reducing energy costs in all sectors of the build environment in direct contact with suppliers of a range of products, services and solutions that can benefit them through the delivery of reduced energy costs, improved facilities and a reduction in waste management”

As part of the Expo I’ll be delivering a seminar on 3 ways to save money with Purchase Order Software on the afternoon of Wednesday 27^th. In the seminar we’ll be looking at how any PO system should help to save money on purchasing, and what the 3 main areas to concentrate on are. Make sure you book a seat in advance!

http://www.corkenergyexpo.ie/seminars/

1. Reduce costs: once a system is put in to control expenditure you will see a decrease in spending, when used across a large company this can have a very positive impact. This could be between 2/5% depending on the company and the industry. Any organisation with high staff turnover can save more in some cases.

2. Visibility and control: A significant amount of time wasted by the finance team can be put down to chasing “ghost” invoices that arrive when no one knows about the goods or services they relate to. PO systems stop this happening and can also speed up the process of sign off by keeping all the data in a single place.

3. Better auditing: As part of ISO9000 it’s usually recommended to have a PO system in place to aid compliance. It can also speed up an external financial audit which results in lower fee’s.

These would be very common reasons for implementation, although each company we’ve worked with has many smaller specific reasons as well.

It looks like the promise of a free Amazon Kindle did the trick as we had hundreds of detailed responses; it’s taken us some time to go through them all but we’ve managed to generate a short list of common requests.

As always we need to evaluate how each additional feature will interact with the system (and sometimes we need to postpone certain features as part of this) but so far the most requested features are as follows:

• Ability to review and comment on a requisition without having to authorise it.

This is an interesting one, in larger organisations the PO can be reviewed by up to 5 people before its authorised. As such it would be helpful if these users could make comments to note their approval without needing the actual permissions to authorise it.

• Invoicing cannot take place against a PO unless the goods have been received first

This has been requested a number of time and as such we’re more than likely going to include it in version 8. However, it will be optional so that companies who are more service related won’t be forced to use this workflow.

• System should offer the ability to E mail documents with the purchase order

A very popular request indeed. For companies that have POs in the range of a million pounds plus it’s essential that the supporting documentation for the purchase is attached in a single place. From now on when a document is stored you’ll have the ability to mark it for internal use only, or for inclusion with the E mailed purchase order.

• Ability to View / Print POs from any search screen

This should save a huge amount of time for any user who’s on the system all day checking deliveries and purchases.

• Cancelled Purchase orders to be marked as cancelled on the printed and E mailed version.

A small change, but a very handy one!

• “Summary” button to be added on the Audit trail tab: this should have all the data of the PO at the line item level (including charge to accounts), all the notes, and all the audit trail entries. Should be formatted for printing.

Again, for many larger organisations under regulation this will be a huge time saver. The ability to export all the relevant details with a single mouse click will help to speed up internal audits, end of month reconciliations etc.

• Approval limits per person adjusted for different departments.

This may add complexity to the initial set up process, but gives even greater options for budgeting.

• Tax rates to 4 DP

Again for larger clients outside in certain industries, tax rates can be up to 4 decimal places for certain regions and items! We’ll have to admit our ignorance of that as we’ve never seen it, but again, something that will help the larger organisations.

Any who was the lucky winner of the Kindle in the end? We’ll let you know as soon as it’s been shipped… Watch this space!

It’s worthwhile understanding that the system has been developed by looking at the real life purchasing scenarios that happen in most organisations. From our own experience over the past 7 years we found that the more complicated the process, the more it gets circumvented in practice as so the software has to be as simple as it can be.

With that in mind the system has been developed with certain assumptions to help this process:

1. Most people know  who to talk to about authorising a purchase for a department – as such they can select from a list very accurately. If its incorrectly forwarded to a user, that user can always forward it to the correct person.

2. Less than 5-10% of all purchasing is questionable: although user / department limits are important, it’s more important to make sure the right person analyses and approves the purchase after looking at it properly.

3. No one wants to get fired for authorising a high value purchase. If there’s any questions they’ll make sure to have them answered before clicking the “Create PO” button

4. No one has ever put together a high value purchase order without it being discussed several times a board / C level. As such you may not need as many approval levels as you think.

5. High level managers and board members quite often give their user credentials to their PA’s with the instruction to click the “authorise” button if they’re not around. Its best to keep the majority of authorisation requests slightly bellow this level for the most part.

The system doesn’t allow for user specified complex work flows to be created; you can not specify user A reports to user B who then reports to user C as this would need to be hard coded within the application. As our system works on dynamically selecting the correct approver depending on the user limits and security that’s been set up, to hard code this would break the logic. Having said that it does allow for a very robust and quick approval process by using multiple approvals, user limits and departments. This may make the set up and roll out slightly more complicated at the start but it also allows exceptions to be handled very quickly and simple which is the downfall of hard coding these values: authorising users being absent, additional users being added at any level within the system, users being removed Etc.

Approval works in the following way:

1. Firstly the user must have the ability to raise a PO for the department in question.

2. They will also need the ability to approve on behalf of that department. If that’s not been granted then they will have to get someone else to authorise the PO

3. The purchase must be less than their “per transaction” value

4. The purchase must be less that their monthly budget, and less than the total of all the PO’s they’ve raised or authorised that calendar month.

5. Finally, the purchase order value must be below the department’s budget and not push it over – even when added to all the other purchases for that month.

6. OPTIONAL – if there are multiple approvals needed then it has to go through steps 1-4 for each approver needed

Note – the system does not differentiate between users ordering for different departments. If a user can authorise £2K they can do this for ALL departments they authorise for – it cannot be set on a per department basis.

“It would also help if you explained in details how the system works out approvals, e.g: individual limit, dep limit, PO rules limit, number of approvers…”

It’s worthwhile understanding that the system has been developed by looking at the real life purchasing scenarios that happen in most organisations. From our own experience over the past 7 years we found that the more complicated the process, the more it gets circumvented in practice as so the software has to be as simple as it can be.

With that in mind the system has been developed with certain assumptions to help this process:

1. Most people know  who to talk to about authorising a purchase for a department – as such they can select from a list very accurately. If its incorrectly forwarded to a user, that user can always forward it to the correct person.

2. Less than 5-10% of all purchasing is questionable: although user / department limits are important, it’s more important to make sure the right person analyses and approves the purchase after looking at it properly.

3. No one wants to get fired for authorising a high value purchase. If there’s any questions they’ll make sure to have them answered before clicking the “Create PO” button

4. No one has ever put together a high value purchase order without it being discussed several times a board / C level. As such you may not need as many approval levels as you think.

5. High level managers and board members quite often give their user credentials to their PA’s with the instruction to click the “authorise” button if they’re not around. Its best to keep the majority of authorisation requests slightly bellow this level for the most part.

The system doesn’t allow for user specified complex work flows to be created; you can not specify user A reports to user B who then reports to user C as this would need to be hard coded within the application. As our system works on dynamically selecting the correct approver depending on the user limits and security that’s been set up, to hard code this would break the logic. Having said that it does allow for a very robust and quick approval process by using multiple approvals, user limits and departments. This may make the set up and roll out slightly more complicated at the start but it also allows exceptions to be handled very quickly and simple which is the downfall of hard coding these values: authorising users being absent, additional users being added at any level within the system, users being removed Etc.

Approval works in the following way:

1. Firstly the user must have the ability to raise a PO for the department in question.

2. They will also need the ability to approve on behalf of that department. If that’s not been granted then they will have to get someone else to authorise the PO

3. The purchase must be less than their “per transaction” value

4. The purchase must be less that their monthly budget, and less than the total of all the PO’s they’ve raised or authorised that calendar month.

5. Finally, the purchase order value must be below the department’s budget and not push it over – even when added to all the other purchases for that month.

6. OPTIONAL – if there are multiple approvals needed then it has to go through steps 1-4 for each approver needed

Note – the system does not differentiate between users ordering for different departments. If a user can authorise £2K they can do this for ALL departments they authorise for – it cannot be set on a per department basis.