I have several questions about our procurement processes but I’m not sure to whom I should direct my questions.
Do we maintain a central list of “corporate” accounts that we hold with various suppliers? If so, who maintains that list?
If we don’t have a central list, what’s to prevent multiple committees or individuals from having duplicate accounts with the same supplier, potentially with different terms and/or discounts?
I’m not looking to buy things and have DMS pay for them - I’m looking to give DMS business to established suppliers with whom we already have a successful track record. And preferably suppliers who honor our tax exemption certificate, give favorable payment terms, and possibly even discounts.
By consolidating some of our purchasing we might also get better volume discounts.
EDIT: One more. How do we keep track of where we bought things previously? Do we just rely on oral history and tribal knowledge?
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The expense system for the credit cards held all of the receipts. Not sure it’s is still like that anymore. I’m not aware of any centralized vendor account list.
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I’m on my phone so excuse the brief message.
The accountant holds the list of all accounts we have open. Expensify keeps track of receipts and QuickBooks keeps track of all vendor expenses.
Of the procurement officers we have, a majority of the spend comes from Steve Blanchard and Stan Simmons, who already coordinate their expenditure from shared vendors.
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Does “open” mean accounts which have something outstanding against them, or does that mean suppliers from whom we routinely purchase things?
Should mean both. Including vendors who let us purchase things without immediate payment, which we discourage.
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That’s an interesting point. Most organizations pay for things when they are received (or some specific number of days thereafter) in order to optimize cash flow.
I’m sure that for control purposes (and to reduce the potential for abuse) we want to pay immediately. But I would guess that our policy should consider the cost of what we are buying. For instance, if we were buying a $50,000 dust collector, we’d probably want to defer the expense until the item actually arrives …
As a procurement ofcr I request - make that demand - an email/PM with links to the items to be ordered. I will not accept a verbal only order. Puts the responsibility on the person - usually a fellow committee chair - wanting things ordered. This creates a record and usually/hopefully is kept by the committee. Charges show up on Expensify some 3 - 7+ days. Reports require a receipt before being submitted to the Bookkeeper. Reports also require the committee to be charged and comments on the order. Some committees keep a list of vendors and links to consumable items.
Hope this helps.
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Just to be clear Expensify while can be used as a source it should not be all receipts should be uploaded into QBO by Expensify so Quickbooks is the sole source of financial data.