Let the customer administer it themselves
Procurement data belongs to the buying company. Every week you spend maintaining it is a week their Einkauf spends emailing you instead of ordering. Handing it over is the goal, not a concession.
Why this matters more than it sounds
A mid-sized customer reorganises constantly in small ways. Someone joins the workshop. A cost centre is retired at the end of the year. A budget is topped up in March. A site manager leaves and their approvals need a new owner by Monday.
If every one of those is a ticket to your Innendienst, three things happen: the changes are late, the data drifts out of line with their ERP, and your team owns a workload that grows with every customer you sign. The customers who use the shop hardest are the ones who change the most.
What the customer's admin may change
The admin role on a contact runs their own organization: its people, their
roles, and its master data. In procurement terms that means:
| They own | Why |
|---|---|
| Cost centres — creating, renaming, retiring | It is their chart of accounts. It changes when their ERP does |
| Owners and deputies | They know who is on holiday. You do not |
| Personal spend limits | Their internal authority, granted by them |
| Contact roles — who requests, buys, approves | Same |
| Budget amounts, and manual adjustments in-year | Their money |
| The approver named on their own rules | Their policy |
Every one of those is a change the customer can make correctly and you cannot make quickly.
What stays with you
| You keep | Why |
|---|---|
| Whether the apps are installed | A platform decision — see Apps and the Marketplace |
| Restrictions that reference your catalogue | Product, category and catalogue restrictions point at your data. A customer admin cannot see your category tree and should not be guessing at it |
prevent rules | A hard stop refuses orders. That is a commercial decision with your revenue on the other side of it, and it belongs in a conversation |
| The ERP mapping | The cost centre reaching the invoice is an integration you own — see Field mapping |
| Number ranges and order settings | Yours, not theirs |
The line is consistent: the customer owns their policy, you own anything that touches your catalogue, your revenue or your systems. When a request does not fit that line cleanly, it is usually a sign the customer wants something modelled differently rather than something delegated.
Hand it over
- Confirm the structure is complete and has survived a month of real orders.
- Set the
adminrole on the one or two people at the customer who will own it — their Einkaufsleiter and a deputy. Not five people. See Contacts and roles. - Walk them through the three things they will actually do: add a person, move an owner, top up a budget. Not a tour of every screen.
- Give them the escalation path in writing: what to change themselves, and what to ask you for.
- Agree a review — once a quarter is enough. Fifteen minutes reading the cost-centre list and the approver list together catches almost everything before it becomes a support case.
Audit of their changes
Delegation only works if it is visible. Two trails cover it:
- Budget movements — every reservation, confirmation, withdrawal and manual adjustment appends an entry carrying the amount, the reason and the person. A budget that was topped up by €5,000 in March shows who did it. See Reading the budget ledger.
- People and roles — changes to contacts land on the customer timeline. See Customer activity.
What you should actually look at, rather than everything: manual budget adjustments and approver changes. Those are the two that can quietly undo a control. A limit raised for a shutdown and never lowered, or a budget topped up every month by the person who spends it, are the patterns worth a phone call.
What to check
- Have the customer's admin make one real change while you watch — adding a deputy is a good one. If they cannot find it, the handover was a demo, not a handover.
- Confirm they cannot change anything on the list you kept. An admin who can set
a
preventrule will eventually set one on a Friday afternoon. - Look at the ledger a month later. If every entry is still yours, the handover did not take.
Next
- The buyer's path — what their people now do.
- Procurement data hygiene — the quarterly review.