The buyer and approver paths

Procurement reports for your customer

Spend by cost centre, approvals by approver, cycle time.

Spend visibility is one of the four controls a purchasing department is protecting, and it is the one you can hand them without them asking. A quarterly spend breakdown by cost centre is worth more to a customer's Einkaufsleiter than a discount, because it is the thing they currently produce by hand.

Before you begin. These reports run over the datasets the Cost Centers and Approval Workflows apps publish, in Analytics › Reports. If the datasets are missing, the apps are not installed for that tenant — see Apps and the Marketplace.

The three questions worth reporting on

Everything a procurement department asks reduces to one of three. Build these and stop.

Spend by cost centre

The one they ask for. Committed value grouped by cost centre over a period, against the budget for the same period.

Useful to them because it arrives before the invoices do. Their own figure comes out of accounts payable and is three weeks behind; this one is current to the last order.

Report it per period rather than year-to-date. KST-2200 at 94% of budget means nothing without knowing that it is October.

Approvals by approver

Count and value of decisions per approver, plus what is still open on each.

This is a management report, and it is the one that finds the two failure modes of an approval policy: an approver with a hundred decisions a month who has stopped reading them, and an approver with three who is the bottleneck for a whole department.

Cycle time

How long a purchase request waits between submission and its final decision.

Track the median and the worst case, never the average — the average hides the €40,000 request that waited nine days, and that request is the one that decides whether the customer's purchasing department defends the shop internally.

Two related numbers earn their place next to it:

  • Share of orders needing approval at all. If it is above about 20%, the thresholds are too low and the approvers are being worn out on drill bits.
  • Rejection rate. Consistently high means buyers do not understand the policy, which is a training problem, not a workflow problem.

Build one

  1. Go to Analytics › Reports and pick the dataset — the cost-centre and request datasets are grouped under the app that owns them.
  2. Open it as a timeframed report. You get a trend, totals for the period, and a breakdown.
  3. Set the date range to the customer's period. Their financial year is not always the calendar year.
  4. Filter to the one organization. Build the filter once and save it as a segment named for the customer — Müller GmbH procurement — so every report of that dataset can reuse it.
  5. Export what is on screen as CSV.

For a chart that does not exist as a prepared view — spend by cost centre as a stacked bar per month, say — hand the dataset to the chart builder and put the result on a dashboard the customer's account team can open.

Do not report on requests as if they were orders. A purchase request is not revenue and never becomes one until it is approved. Mixing the two produces a figure that overstates the customer's spend by everything that was ever rejected. Check which dataset a report is running over before you send it to anybody.

Getting it to the customer

Two honest options, and one that does not exist yet.

Ad-hoc export. Run the report, export CSV, send it. Fine for a quarterly review, which is the cadence most Mittelstand customers actually want.

A workflow. For anything recurring — a monthly spend file into their finance mailbox or an SFTP folder — build it in Integration Studio, where scheduling, retries and failure alerting actually run. See Build a workflow and SFTP and file exchange.

Scheduled delivery from the Exports screen stores a schedule and sends nothing. Do not promise it. See Reports and exports.

Two things to agree with the customer before the first file:

  • The format. CSV is the only one — no Excel, no PDF. If their controller opens it in a German Excel, check the decimal separator on the first file rather than the fourth.
  • Cost-centre codes as text. 04711 becomes 4711 the moment a spreadsheet decides it is a number, and then it matches nothing in their ERP.

What to check

  • A row count exactly equal to your limit means the export was truncated, not complete. The cap is 10,000 rows.
  • Compare one cost centre's reported spend against its ledger for the same period. They should agree; if they do not, the report is probably including requests.
  • Send the first report to the customer's controller and ask them to mark what is missing. They will tell you in one email what six months of guessing would not.

Next

Reading the budget ledger

Reserved, committed, spent, remaining.

Troubleshoot

Keep it healthy — Procurement & Approvals.