It’s the most stressful time of year for public entities – fiscal year-end is approaching! Departments with remaining budgetary dollars or grants and other federal funds that require the solicitation process to be completed by the end of a budgetary cycle are anxious to spend it. As a result, purchasing takes a higher priority for the entire organization, with procurement professionals making it happen!
Quicker Purchasing
Under certain threshold amounts, procurement teams are only required to reach out for three quick quotes before choosing the most advantageous offer. Doing this by phone and email can take a lot of time. An automated procurement system that reaches out to suppliers, sends reminder notices, and obtains the quotes by automatically sending an email to all interested parties significantly speeds up this process.
A well-stocked eProcurement system can provide access to thousands of procurements conducted by other agencies, allowing you to search by multiple criteria, including piggy-backable clauses. Why reinvent the wheel when you can take advantage of the work performed by others to help lighten the load during year-end?
Year-End Reports
Whether it's tracking all products purchased that meet sustainability goals, minority or disadvantaged business participation, or dollars spent per division, procurement can be heavily involved in producing reports at the end of the fiscal year. These reports also help establish the proposed budgets for the following year.
Prepare to Encumber
Government practices often require a need to be identified, then the commodity or service purchased, delivered, and paid for – all within the same fiscal year. However, that may not be the case in times when many suppliers face manufacturing and delivery delays, with shortages in stocked inventory. Orders may be placed in the fall but not delivered until spring. Encumbering funds for end-of-year may be a larger task this year, with teams creating lists of all items that can be purchased during this fiscal year that won’t be delivered and paid for until next year. Automation can help ease this burden.
Inflation with Pricing Increases
Manufacturers are dealing with substantial price increases for input materials and rising labor costs. Procurement teams are increasingly receiving price adjustment requests, which impact the spending budgets of customer departments. On behalf of their customers, procurement often monitors the bottom line more closely to ensure last-minute purchases do not cause over-budget purchases.
Coordination of Multiple Demands
Many of these activities require procurement teams to work across the silos of their organization – customer departments, auditor and finance, and management teams. An eProcurement system that is easy and intuitive to use, produces as-needed reports, and feeds data to the organization’s existing financial systems while protecting data from intrusion offers the best coordination and collaboration for teams. It definitely beats handwritten notes, spreadsheets, and manual tracking processes.
PlanetBids offers a proven online solution successfully used by public procurement teams across the nation. Don’t let another fiscal year end without having a system to manage the many moving parts of year-end responsibilities.
Schedule a demo with PlanetBids to incorporate eProcurement into your budget for the new fiscal year.