Procurement visibility is a key to your budget control

Keeping your company’s spend in check is tough. Procurement visibility changes that. Without it, costs slip away. With it, you gain control and save cash. 

When you can see every step of the procurement process, you catch waste before it happens, tighten processes, and stay on budget—every time. 

What is procurement visibility?

Procurement visibility refers to complete transparency in the internal operations, spending, and purchasing processes within the organization. It allows teams to track purchases, suppliers, and costs at every stage of the procurement cycle. 

With real-time insights, decision-makers can identify where money is going, spot inefficiencies, and optimize procurement strategies to avoid unnecessary expenses. 

As a result, procurement activities align with business goals and give decision-makers access to real-time data. It also helps them control spending more effectively and maintain better supplier relationships.

How procurement visibility leads to spending visibility

In many organizations, Procurement Category Directors and Chief Procurement Officers start their procurement process with the analysis of the past company’s spending. They try to understand who their supplies are, how much the company spends for each of them, and in what country, region, and location the invoices were issued. 

Unfortunately, this process is not as easy as it seems when the company starts to scale its operations and wants to gather all spending data in one place.  

Complex procurement processes created at a corporate level often fail when rolled out across multiple entities. The reason is simple: each entity operates differently, and a one-size-fits-all approach leads to inconsistent visibility and compliance. 

Hence, a more practical approach is to start with procurement visibility on the most fundamental level: initial invoice data. Tracking invoices provides immediate insights into how spending happens across the company.

Every invoice becomes a valuable data point and allows procurement teams to identify gaps in the process and adjust spending policies accordingly. As invoice visibility increases, procurement teams can focus on consolidating suppliers, setting savings targets, and gradually streamlining processes across the organization. 

Such a strategy helps businesses achieve realistic procurement goals and avoid the pitfalls of costly, large-scale systems that don’t align with day-to-day operations. In this way, procurement visibility leads to spending visibility from day one. 

Benefits of procurement process visibility

When businesses have a clear view of their procurement activities, it allows them to streamline processes, optimize spending, and ensure compliance. Here are the key benefits of procurement visibility:

• Clear visibility into expenditures leads to proactive adjustments to budgets, aligning the company’s finances with strategic goals.
• Procurement teams build stronger relationships and manage suppliers more effectively. This visibility allows teams to monitor performance, evaluate compliance, and negotiate better terms for future contracts.
• All purchases in the company follow internal policies and external regulations, making procurement processes transparent and compliant.
• Visibility into spending patterns and supplier relationships leads to smarter decision-making and more efficient use of resources across the company.

Challenges of achieving procurement visibility

Achieving full visibility in procurement is no small task. Many organizations struggle to streamline their procurement processes due to a combination of operational inefficiencies and resistance to change. Below are some of the most significant challenges companies face:

1. Lack of standardized processes for Intake-to-Procure

Without a clear, standardized procurement process, companies struggle to maintain visibility across all purchasing activities. 

This can lead to missing or delayed purchase orders, fragmented supplier relationships, and scattered spending data. When each department follows different procurement methods, centralizing this data becomes a significant challenge.

This inconsistency directly impacts how efficiently companies can manage spending and vendor relationships, creating blind spots in procurement visibility.

2. Poor understanding of suppliers’ operation

Many businesses struggle to gain real-time insights into their suppliers’ performance, financial health, or environmental practices.

According to the KPMG study, many companies lack visibility into their primary suppliers’ performance, including aspects like financial stability and production capacity.

This lack of transparency creates risks in the supply chain, which can result in inefficiencies, delayed deliveries, and compliance failures.

3. Employees don’t follow existing processes and resist changes

Even when processes are in place, employees often bypass them because they are too complex or time-consuming. For example, employees may skip formal approval steps or use non-preferred suppliers, further complicating procurement operations. 

There are multiple other reasons why employees are not ready to adopt new systems:

• Employees may worry that new procurement systems will make their roles less necessary and fear job displacement.
• Without concrete evidence that new tools will deliver clear benefits, employees may hesitate to use them. The “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mindset can dominate.
• Employees often get accustomed to legacy systems or specific suppliers.
• Some employees may fear that new procurement processes will expose inefficiencies, non-compliance, or unethical practices within the organization.

Ways to achieve visibility in procurement 

Procurement visibility doesn’t happen automatically. To overcome these challenges, companies need to take specific actions to bring visibility to each stage of the procurement process.

Below are some strategies that can help:

• Standardization of the procurement process. Create a structured intake-to-procure process that every department follows. As a result, procurement requests will follow a consistent path, helping businesses capture and track every transaction more effectively. 
• Automation for approval workflows. Introduce automated systems that will reduce manual intervention, speeding up the procurement process and decreasing the risk of human error. Control that each step of the procurement cycle is completed in real-time, giving procurement managers instant access to data. 
• Employee adoption. Integrate procurement tools into platforms that employees already use. For example, Spendbase procurement management software integrates with Slack to bring procurement into the everyday workspace. Employees can make requests, track approvals, and receive updates—all within Slack. 

How to achieve visibility at each procurement cycle stage 

How procurement tools improve visibility

To achieve procurement visibility companies have to gain strategic control over spending and avoid financial surprises. Procurement tools offer a comprehensive solution to streamline processes, centralize data, and guarantee effective management of procurement cycles. 

Key features of procurement tools to achieve visibility

• Centralized data management. A key aspect of visibility is having all procurement-related data in one place. Procurement tools centralize data from purchase orders, supplier details, invoices, and payments. This provides decision-makers with real-time insights, helping them make informed, data-driven decisions.
• Automated approval flows. Automation reduces manual interventions, which can introduce errors and delays. With automated workflows, procurement requests, approvals, and supplier onboarding processes move efficiently. As a result, data is continuously updated and readily available for analysis.
• Real-time tracking and spending analysis. Procurement tools provide real-time tracking of expenditures, approvals, and supplier interactions. Additionally, spend analysis features help procurement teams identify inefficiencies like duplicate spending, missed negotiation opportunities, or excessive costs in certain categories.
• Integration capabilities. Most procurement tools integrate with your company’s tech stack. Seamless integration with project management tools, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and communication platforms helps users access procurement features without switching between multiple systems.
• Flexible workflow management. Flexible workflows allow procurement managers to tailor approval processes to different teams, departments, or scenarios and cover all aspects of the procurement process.

Spendbase for procurement visibility in SMBs

Spendbase’s procurement features address the core challenges faced by mid-sized companies and help control spending, improve efficiency, and ensure visibility of the procurement process:

• Flexible workflows create a clear hierarchy for purchase request approvals. Each request goes to the right person at the right time, preventing violations of approval hierarchies.
• Every request is tracked from start to finish. This transparency helps procurement teams and financial managers stay aligned with budgetary goals.
• Users can make and approve requests directly from Slack, making company-wide adoption easier and improving overall visibility.
• Spendbase provides access to vendor discounts and helps you secure significant savings. 
• The platform helps track spend and proactively address budget creep and optimize procurement strategies.