The buyer and approver paths

Procurement reporting

What you can pull from the lists and the ledger.

Spend visibility is one of the four controls a purchasing department protects, and the one you can hand them without being asked. A quarterly overview per cost centre is worth more to a customer's Einkaufsleiter than a discount, because it is what they currently build by hand.

There are no prepared procurement reports or analytics datasets for the procurement and cost-centers apps. What you have are the Cockpit lists, their filters and their CSV export, and the ledger on every budget. That covers the questions customers actually ask, if you know which list answers which.

Which list answers which question

The customer asksWhere you lookExport
How much of each budget is used?Procurement › Cost centres › Budgets: Allowance and Remaining per budget and period, filterable by cost centreCSV
What moved on this budget, and why?The budget's Ledger tab: every entry with reason, amount and request or orderOn screen
Which requests are open, approved, declined?Procurement › Purchase requests, filtered by status, PR number or organisationCSV
Who decided this request, and when?The request's Approvals and History tabsOn screen
Which cost centres exist, and who is accountable?Procurement › Cost centres › Cost centresCSV
What are the personal limits?Procurement › Cost centres › Personal limitsCSV
Which rules are in force?Procurement › Approval rulesCSV

Spend used on a budget is its allowance minus what remains. Remember what "used" includes: the remaining amount drops when a request is submitted, so it counts pending requests as well as orders. If the customer wants placed orders only, take the ledger and leave out the Reservation entries that have no later Order or Withdrawal. See Reading the budget ledger.

A quarterly overview, step by step

  1. Open Procurement › Cost centres › Budgets and filter by the customer's cost centres. Budgets of finished periods are inactive but still listed.
  2. Export the list as CSV. Each row is one budget for one period, with allowance and remaining.
  3. Open Procurement › Purchase requests, filter by the customer's organisation, and export. Count by status for the quarter: how many requests, how many declined, how many still pending.
  4. For any cost centre over its allowance, open the budget's ledger and note the largest entries. That is the conversation the controller wants to have.
  5. Send the two files and your notes. A quarter is the cadence most Mittelstand customers want.
Do not report requests as if they were orders. A purchase request is not revenue and becomes an order only when it is approved. Counting requests as spend overstates the customer's spend by everything that was declined. Use the Order column of the request list, or the orders themselves, for what was actually ordered.

Two things to agree before the first file

  • Cost-centre codes as text. 04711 becomes 4711 the moment a spreadsheet decides it is a number, and then it matches nothing in the ERP.
  • The decimal separator. If the controller opens the CSV in a German Excel, check the first file with them rather than the fourth.

For anything recurring

Each purchase-request outcome (requested, approved, declined, cancelled, ordered) is published as an event. A monthly spend file or a feed into the customer's own controlling is best built on those events, or on the orders, in the system that receives them, rather than by hand from the Cockpit.

Next

Reading the budget ledger

Every movement on a budget, and what caused it.

Troubleshoot

Keep it healthy — Procurement & Approvals.