A simple question with no answer
Before a supplier review you ask a simple question: how much did we spend with them last year? Finance runs a report and gets a number. Then someone notices the same supplier appears as the full company name, an abbreviation, a trading name, a version with "Ltd" and without, and a separate account set up by a different site. The real number is somewhere across all of them.
The category view is worse. A large share of spend sits in "sundries", "general purchases" or whatever nominal code the person entering the invoice picked. You want to know what you spend on packaging, or IT, or cleaning supplies, across the business, and the answer is a week of someone's time in a spreadsheet.
Why spend data gets this messy
Supplier records are created by many people over many years, often under time pressure. Different sites, different systems after an acquisition, a purchase card here and an expense claim there. Nobody deduplicates, because each record works on its own.
Coding is similar. Nominal codes are chosen by whoever processes the invoice, and the chart of accounts is built for the accounts, not for buying decisions. "Office costs" might hold printer toner, a coffee machine and a software subscription. The information is in the invoice line descriptions, but nobody reads thousands of lines.
What poor spend visibility costs
| Blind spot | What follows |
|---|---|
| Split supplier records | You underestimate your spend and negotiate from weakness |
| Spend in catch-all codes | Categories look smaller than they are and get no attention |
| Same item from many suppliers | Missed chances to consolidate and agree better terms |
| Off-contract purchases | Staff buy from whoever is convenient |
| Manual analysis | Every spend review takes days and is out of date on arrival |
Procurement decisions end up based on the few big suppliers everyone knows, while the long tail, where much of the waste usually sits, stays invisible.
How we clean and classify your spend
- We extract spend data from your accounting and purchasing systems, such as Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, NetSuite or your ERP, along with purchase card and expense data where relevant.
- We match supplier name variants to single suppliers using fuzzy matching on names, addresses, VAT numbers and bank details, with a person confirming the uncertain matches.
- We agree a spend category structure with you, either your own or a standard one such as UNSPSC, at the level of detail you will actually use.
- We train a classification model on lines you have already categorised correctly, then use it to classify the rest from invoice line descriptions, supplier and amount.
- Lines the model is unsure about go to a short review queue, and every correction is used to improve the model.
- We deliver a spend dashboard by supplier, category, site and period, and run new transactions through the same process automatically so the view stays current.
We can also write the clean supplier and category back into your systems if you want the fix at source, but many businesses start with a separate spend view and tidy the source records gradually.
What procurement and finance get
One figure per supplier, one figure per category, and the ability to drill down to the invoices behind it. You can see where the same thing is bought from several suppliers, where spend has grown, and which categories deserve a proper tender.
Spend reviews become a look at a dashboard rather than a week in spreadsheets, and they reflect last month rather than last year.
It also changes supplier meetings. Walking in with an accurate total across every name the supplier trades under, and a view of what else you buy that they could supply, puts the conversation on a different footing.
Is this your situation?
- Nobody can quickly say how much you spend with a given supplier.
- Suppliers appear under several names or accounts.
- A large share of spend is coded to sundries or general categories.
- Spend analysis happens rarely because it takes so long.
- You suspect you buy the same things from too many suppliers.