5 years ago
How a BAM platform can be a finance teams best friend
Stuart Cripps-Schnoor
Decentralised ordering of print and stock fulfilment is an extremely common problem across larger and regionally disparate organisations. There are often multiple suppliers being used and financial control and reconciliation can quickly become unmanageable. Often there is a lack of visibility and finance are the last to know about a purchase being made. This contributes to a huge amount of time being spent chasing internal staff and external suppliers to gain the insight required to pay and reconcile the transactions
Any offline processes are often hard to control and as majority of print and merchandise procurement is owned by the marketing and brand teams, conversations around finance and reporting can be overlooked or ignored.
Even though brand management platforms are often associated with the creation and storage of brand assets they can also become an incredibly powerful tool in managing all aspects of the print, stock and fulfilment process. By using a centralised and online solution financial teams gain visibility and information that wouldn’t be available through more traditional process, which can dramatically reduce the exposure and improve control.
1. A single source of information – Using a centralised solution means all orders originate and are tracked in the same place giving complete visibility and detail.
2. Pricing – Pricing can be agreed and preloaded against each item to ensure that all users are accessing the negotiated rates and attaining the correct economies of scale.
3. Financial control – Brand management solutions will allow you to allocate different payment options to users or organisations. Budgets can be set and managed regularly to control spend. Credit limits can be assigned and POs can be used to enhance tracking and reconciliation.
4. Approvals – Approval workflows allow complete control over what is being purchased and spent. These workflows represent a vital aspect to controlling ordering in real-time.
5. Restrictions – Setting order restrictions for quantities and items can manage purchasing at an automated level and steer users to order sensibly.
6. Stock - If the solution is providing materials or items from a pre-existing stock, management of this stock becomes critical from a financial and operational perspective. Complete visibility on stock movement, stock levels and values can improve availability and financial reporting.
7. Data extraction – Reporting represents the biggest single challenge and having all the data in a format that can be easily extracted, analysed and imported to other financial systems can improve efficiencies, errors and save time.
In conclusion, A brand management solution isn’t just for the brand and marketing teams. It can provide an invaluable platform for financial teams to control spend, gain valuable and real-time insight into each order and dramatically improve efficiencies in reconciling transactions.
