Procurement and source-to-pay
What the business buys, from whom, at what price, under which contract.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Requisitions, purchase orders, contracts, supplier records, catalogue prices and the invoice matching that governs payment.
Requisition, Purchase order, Contract, Supplier, Catalogue item, Invoice, Receipt, Payment term
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Vendor APIs and scheduled extracts. Spend classification is the real work: most estates have a large proportion of spend that is uncategorised or miscategorised.
Suppliers are duplicated across ERP, procurement and AP under different identifiers, which is why supplier spend consolidation is one of the highest-return resolution projects available.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Maverick and off-contract spend
Purchases made outside the negotiated contract are the point of the analysis, and they are precisely the ones with the weakest data.
Supplier duplication
The same parent company appears many times, so negotiating leverage is systematically understated.
Category classification is unreliable
Free-text descriptions and inconsistent categories mean spend cubes need enrichment before they mean anything.
Three-way match exceptions carry the cost
Where PO, receipt and invoice disagree is where working capital and price leakage both live.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| ERP / AP | purchase order to invoice to payment, and payment terms actually taken |
| WMS | receipt against ordered quantity and supplier lead time |
| Item master | price paid for the same item across sites and entities |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
What is the fastest procurement win from better data?
Supplier resolution plus price variance for the same item across sites. It needs no process change and usually funds the wider programme.
Why is spend classification so hard?
Because the description is written by the requester, not by a taxonomy. Classification has to be inferred from supplier, item and context, which is exactly the kind of enrichment a governed platform should do once.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.