Troubleshoot
Procurement data hygiene
Stale cost centres, orphaned budgets, approvers who left.
Procurement data rots faster than catalogue data, because it tracks an organisation chart and organisation charts change. A model that was correct at go-live is wrong within a year unless somebody looks at it.
What rots, and how fast
| Thing | Goes stale when | Noticed |
|---|---|---|
| Cost centres | The customer reorganises, usually at the financial year | When an order books to a department that no longer exists |
| Budgets | A period ends and the next was never opened | The first order of January is refused or unbudgeted |
| Owners and deputies | Somebody leaves or changes role | When a request waits a week |
| Personal limits | Raised for a shutdown and never lowered | By an auditor |
| Approval rules | The policy changed and only the written version was updated | When an order that should have been signed was not |
The pattern: the data fails quietly and is discovered by an order that behaves unexpectedly. That is why this is a routine rather than an alert.
Weekly: five minutes
Only two things are worth looking at this often, and both are about money in flight.
- Open decisions older than the escalation wait. Anything sitting longer than it should is a missing deputy or an approver who left. See Approvals that get stuck.
- Reservations older than a week. Held budget is unavailable budget. A request nobody will ever decide is quietly shrinking a department's spending power.
Monthly: fifteen minutes
- Cost centres with no orders in 90 days. Either the department stopped using the shop — worth a phone call — or the cost centre should be retired.
- Cost centres with orders and no budget. Fine if intentional. Ask once, then note the answer, so it does not get re-asked every month.
- Budgets over 80% consumed with more than a quarter of the period left. Tell the customer's controller now. Being warned in October is a service; being refused in November is a complaint.
- Manual budget adjustments. Read every one. They are the entries a person decided on, and a pattern — the same person topping up the same budget monthly — is a governance conversation. See Reading the budget ledger.
- Contacts with a personal limit and no orders. Usually somebody who left.
Quarterly: with the customer
Fifteen minutes with their Einkaufsleiter, reading two lists together.
- The cost-centre list. Anything they do not recognise, retire. Anything missing, add.
- The approver list. Who owns each cost centre, who deputises. This is where departures surface, and they surface reliably — people remember who left far better than they remember which cost centre it affected.
- Cycle time and the share of orders needing approval. If more than about one in five needs a signature, propose raising the thresholds. Customers rarely think to ask for this and are grateful when it is offered.
- Anything they are still doing by email. The honest question, and the one that finds the next thing worth configuring.
Period end
The financial year is the moment everything changes at once. Work through period close first, then:
- Confirm every recurring budget opened its new period at the right amount.
- Check the rollover choice actually did what the customer expected. Reset and carry-over look identical until January.
- Retire cost centres that did not survive the reorganisation. Retire, never delete — orders already carry the code and the history has to stay readable.
- Re-import the cost-centre list from the customer's ERP if they reorganised. See Field mapping.
Deleting a cost centre breaks history. The code is on order lines that are
already invoiced. Deactivate so it can no longer be chosen and stays legible on
everything that already used it. The same applies to a contact who has approved
things — block the login, keep the person.
When the customer reorganises
The hard case, and it arrives with a week's notice. Two departments merge, a site closes, a new Geschäftsbereich appears.
Order of work matters:
- Get the new list from their ERP, not from an email describing the change.
- Create the new cost centres before touching the old ones. Overlap is fine; a gap is not.
- Move the owners and deputies onto the new cost centres.
- Open budgets on the new ones, then move or close the old budgets. Decide explicitly what happens to a remaining balance — it is their money and their decision.
- Update the rules scoped to the old cost centres. A rule pointing at a retired cost centre stops applying, which means an approval quietly stops happening.
- Settle everything in flight before deactivating the old cost centres. An open request against a retired cost centre is the hardest thing in this area to unwind.
- Deactivate the old cost centres, last.
Do it in a quiet week. A reorganisation executed the same week the new
financial year opens combines the two riskiest operations in this area. Separate
them if the customer will let you.
What to check
- Pick one cost centre at random and name its owner and deputy out loud. If you cannot, the quarterly review is overdue.
- Compare the cost-centre list against the customer's ERP export. Any code in one and not the other is a future invoice nobody can post.
- Look for held budget with no matching open decision. There should never be any.
Next
- Approvals that get stuck — the symptoms this routine prevents.
- Customer data hygiene — the same discipline for people and companies.