Troubleshoot
Procurement data hygiene
Stale cost centres, budgets that did not roll, accountable contacts 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 non-recurring budget ends with no successor, or the nightly run stopped | Buyers no longer see the cost centre at all |
| Accountable contacts | Somebody leaves or changes role | When a request waits a week, or waits on nobody |
| 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 money in flight is worth looking at this often.
- Pending purchase requests older than a few days. Each one holds budget and usually means an approver who is away or a step with nobody behind it. See Approvals that get stuck.
- The two queues. Procurement › Direct order log, queue Commit refused, and Procurement › Budget returns, queue Refused. Both hold cases the hourly reconciliation cannot finish on its own. A queue that is never empty points at a cause worth fixing, not only at entries to settle.
Monthly: fifteen minutes
- Budgets that did not roll. The platform closes recurring budgets and opens their successors once a night. A recurring budget whose period ended longer ago than its own length is reported as stale and left alone: no successor, no carry-over. Look for active budgets whose period end lies well in the past, and open the current period's budget by hand.
- Monetary cost centres without an active budget. They are not offered to buyers. Either the customer forgot the next budget, or the centre should be tracking only, which means a new centre, because the type cannot change.
- Cost centres with no orders in 90 days. Either the department stopped using the shop, which is worth a phone call, or the centre should be retired.
- Budgets over 80% consumed with more than a quarter of the period left. The platform sends no warning, so you do. 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 every month) 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.
- Who approves. The accountable contact of each cost centre, and every contact or role named on a rule. This is where departures surface: people remember who left far better than which cost centre it affected.
- 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 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 the budget ledger first, then:
- The morning after the period ends, confirm every recurring budget closed and its successor opened at the right amount.
- Check the carry-over did what the customer expected.
neverandalwayslook identical until the first morning of the new period. - Bookings on the old period stay there. An order cancelled after its budget closed gives nothing back automatically; moving that money is a manual adjustment.
- Retire cost centres that did not survive the reorganisation. Retire, never delete: switch Active off.
- Re-import the cost-centre list from the customer's ERP if they reorganised. See Field mapping.
A cost centre with budgets cannot be deleted, and should not be. The code
is on order lines that are already invoiced, and the budgets carry the ledger.
Switch Active off 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.
- Set the accountable contacts on the new centres.
- Open budgets on the new monetary centres. Decide explicitly what happens to the remaining balance on the old ones: it is their money and their decision.
- Update the rules scoped to the old cost centres. A rule pointing at a retired centre stops catching anything, which means an approval quietly stops happening.
- Settle everything in flight before deactivating the old centres. Decide or cancel the Pending requests booked to them.
- 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 accountable contact 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.
- Both queues, Commit refused and Refused, are empty or explained.
Next
- Approvals that get stuck: the symptoms this routine prevents.
- Customer data hygiene: the same discipline for people and companies.