Create a Procurement Process
To set up a procurement process for your company, navigate to Processes and click on "new Process."
Build your intake form
Next, you can add Step and Fields to customize your procurement intake form.
Intake Form Steps
Steps are separate pages. You can set up a Step Title and Step Description. Step Description can be very useful to add link to internal documentation for instance.
Spendesk Vendor Step - allow employees to select from a dropdown of existing vendors in your company or add new vendor (this Step is mandatory)
Intake Form Field
You can specify the question type from the following options:
Basic Question Type
📜 Basic Question Type are custom fields you can add to your procurement intake:
Text - free form text box
Text Area long form text box
Single Select radio button select of custom options
Multi Select - select multiple options from list
Document - field to allow for upload of any relevant files for the procurement request
Number - field to allow input of numbers
Date - field to allow input of date
Boolean - yes/no question
Spendesk Question Type
📜 Spendesk Question Type are standard fields you can add yo your requests. Some fields refer to Purchase Request Fields, Purchase Order Fields or Contract Fields.
Conditionally ask questions to streamline the intake process
You can also add conditional questions by clicking on the "+ New condition block" dropdown on each question. Choose a preceding question (type: Boolean, Single Select, Multi Select) and set the logic to conditionally ask questions to your employees. Condition can also be added on Intake Step.
Use the search to find the question on which you want to add the condition.
Build your procurement workflow
For approvals, you’ll need to set up your procurement workflow.
Note, the procurement workflow will only apply to procurement process it was created within.
You can use your intake questions to conditionally route approvals (e.g. If vendor has access to sensitive business information, loop in IT & Security).
Task Types
In a procurement process, you can add different types of tasks:
Task Type | Description |
Approval Task | This task allows to approve a purchase/vendor, collect datas from approvers |
Vendor Onboarding | This task allows to validate a vendor and fill general and bank informations. The vendor will be created and validated in Spendesk's Accounts Payable page for Controllers. |
Create Purchase Order | This task allows to create an approved purchase order in Spendesk. |
Store Contract & Documents | This task allows to store contract with main data and store supporting documents (KBIS, SOC, …) |
Create your first approval task
An approval task is a task that requires completion by an approver. The goal of the task could be to obtain approval, receive a review on specific fields (such as accounting fields for instance), undergo a full review (like an IT security review with its own internal form), or trigger action in another system (create purchase order in Spendesk).
Task Attribute | Description | Exemple | Comments |
Task Assignee | Individual assignation or Team assignation | Requester’s manager, Legal Team |
|
Task Lead Time | Number of days to complete the task | 5 days | This is an indicative information. Notification will be sent to the approver if the task has not been finished within the lead time |
Task Name | Name of the task | Legal Review |
|
Task Description | Description of the task | Legal Team will review key contractual points before giving its approval | As for Intake Step Description, you can add external links into Task Description. |
Task Form | List of fields that need to be filled by the approver | Co Marketing Clause, Auto Renewal Clause |
|
Conditions | Conditions on which the task is triggered | If a Contract_need_to_be_signed is True |
|
Task Relevant Informations | Relevant fields of the procurement request that are useful for the approvers | Amount, Contract Duration, Request Category, Request Signature Due Date |
Task Assignation
Tasks can be assigned to an individual either through absolute assignment (for example, a person in particular) or relative assignment (such as the requester's manager).
List of Relative Assignation Available
Requester
Requester’s manager
Requester’s cost center owner
Requester’s Head of Department
Requester’s Department C-Level
Team assignation
In Spendesk Procurement, a PM can create Teams. These are custom groups that can be assigned to workflow tasks. If you assign a Team, the best practice is also to assign an assignee by default.
Request task assignation
When a request is submitted, any incomplete tasks can be reassigned. The PM can reassign tasks to anyone, the assignee can reassign tasks to anyone, and team members can reassign tasks to themselves.
Task Form
Task Form is working like Intake Form.
Allow approvers to review an Intake Form Field and update it
In Task Form, there is an additional capability : the ability to allow the approver to review and update an information given by the requester in the Intake Form.
To do that, PMs need to add an existing field in the Task Form by selecting a field from the section “Process Question Type”.
If we add several times the same fields in a process, every time assignees edit the answer the request fields is updated with this last value. You can follow the history of this fields with the request audit trail.
In this example, the Intake Form has a field “Volume Commitment” where the requester needs to write if there is any Volume Commitment in the contract and add comments.
PMs can add this field in the Legal Review Task Form, the approver (from the Legal Team) will see the Requester answers and will be able to edit the answers if needed.
Task Condition
Task Condition works like Intake Form Condition.
PMs can add conditions on Process Questions (Process Questions are the Questions that has been added in Intake Form or previous Steps Task Forms).
Click to open the Task, then Click on “+New condition block”.
💡 The best practice to find the Question is to use the search, for instance if you want to add a condition on the payment method, enter “payment” in search and find the right question.
Relevant Information for Task
In the Task, the “Request Data for Task” section allows PM to configure a subset of relevant informations that can be useful for a specific approval task.
When PMs select these fields, these fields will be displayed as read only mode in the Request Data for Task for the approvers.
💡 If you want to let approvers check and update a field, use task form instead of this feature.
For instance, PM add these 4 fields as relevant fields to be monitored by IT Security Team in the “IT Review” Task Approval.