Q-Card for Procurement Professionals
Bring your spending under management, increase the efficiency of administrative tasks, and provide your colleagues with a user-friendly, lightweight purchase request process for all long-tail expenses.
Bringing "Spend under Management"
Bring a strategic approach to gain control by managing your tail spend with Q-Card, enhance visibility, shorten cycle times, and reduce costs. Implement Q-Card's procurement process for this category, allowing you to approve every expense before it occurs and track each department's spending.
Minimize manual tasks with efficiency
Free up time for your procurement team and use the Q-Card app as strategic buying tool. The handling of tail spend is a hidden time consumer. Eliminate the need to create and manage vendors in your ERP for infrequent suppliers, and removing the necessity to create and send out purchase orders.
Transparency and a user-friendly process
Offer your employees a modern and straightforward purchase requisition process and streamline expense authorization. Through the Q-Card closed-loop process, you can gain more upfront transparency with real-time insights into spending analytics and pending expenses.
Do not underestimate the potential that lies within your tail spend!
Most procurement professionals who have researched their tail spend know that, on average, 80% of the spend is paid to 20% of their suppliers. This balance could be even more skewed depending on the industry you're working in.
However, tail spend is often overlooked by procurement because the main focus is on suppliers with high volumes. What many companies don't know, however, is that a tail spend project is relatively easy and inexpensive to execute and implement, while it could save between 100,000 and 1,000,000 EUR or more on an annual basis.
Meanwhile, the increase in online B2B spending complicates tail-end supplier management, limiting procurement teams' control and visibility, and causing unnecessary overspending and maverick spending.
Furthermore, discussions on specific purchase requests often cause significant delays, while vendor master data demands more maintenance and manual data entry, making expenditure management time-consuming, administratively intensive, error-prone, and inefficient.
Therefore, there is a growing need for a fast and flexible consumer-like shopping experience such as Q-Card offers!
Gain control and visibility over every tail spend purchase
When it comes to 'tail spend', every colleague within your organization is a potential buyer. However, the usual declaration tools do not provide them with a clear, easy-to-use purchasing process, nor do they give you the opportunity to control these costs or see in real-time what is being spent.
Save time in your purchasing process
To achieve procurement excellence, it is essential to streamline and automate workflows not only for direct procurement but also for indirect procurement. With Q-Card, every employee across your organization has access to an easy-to-use, consumer-friendly app. This allows them to make purchase requests and provide your finance team with the predefined necessary coding. Upon approval, they immediately receive a virtual MasterCard or Visa card, which can be used for point-of-sale transactions, online purchases, or to initiate a wire transfer.
Efficiency in the procurement process
Increase your efficiency across the board and make sure you can scale and process a higher workload with the same amount of FTEs. Adopt Q-Card's innovative way of working and reduce the number of vendor records you need to create and maintain in your ERP, as well as the number of purchase orders that need to be drafted and sent. Q-Card eliminates the need for such time-consuming and non-value-adding tasks, allowing your team to put their focus on the suppliers with the highest volumes, retaining relationships, closing more deals, and saving costs on both sides.
Get in control
Discover which individual or department spent what, or what is expected to be spent, all in one dashboard. Pre-approve these upcoming purchases beforehand, or approve individual recurring spending limits for specific or multi-purpose use, modifiable according to your own company or department policies and desired workflows. Allow your budget owners to be in control and allocate their budget accordingly.
Obtain visibility in your tail spend
Manage procurement expenses in real time. All purchases made with Q-Card are visible via our real-time audit trail, enabling you and your team to track requests and their statuses, approvals, added documents such as invoices and receipts provided, and completed payments. Use this enhanced visibility to analyze which tail spend suppliers are frequently traded with, and use this data to contact these suppliers to negotiate better deals in the future.
Run a Quick Scan
A payment service to strategically use as an procurement tool
Q-Card is more than an expense management or reimbursement tool. It's a strategic purchasing tool that simplifies the entire tail spend procurement process. Designed to handle everything from point-of-sale (PoS) transactions and online purchases to managing invoices with due dates, Q-Card provides a user-friendly experience for all types of business transactions.
Each transaction is automatically sent to your underlying ERP system(s) through Q-Card's extensive integration capabilities, ensuring data accuracy and full transparency across financial systems. With Q-Card, procurement teams can set up automated workflows, eliminating the need for manual data entry or reconciliation. Approvals are the only step requiring manual work, making Q-Card an ideal solution for organizations looking to streamline purchasing processes and increase efficiency across the board.
FAQ
We believe in keeping it simple, and our main goal is to help your organization manage its tail spend effectively. Therefore, we believe that not all spending should go through a complicated purchase requisition process. Q-Card simplifies the way everyone within your company can make purchases in line with company policies.
- Q-Card functions as a sub-administration for long-tail transactions.
- Our Q-Card requests are equivalent to purchase requests.
- Q-Card serves as a purchase order through a standard approval model but is integrated with a payment method that the request uses directly.
Naturally, our extensive integration capabilities ensure that all data, including coding and attachments, is automatically sent to the underlying ERP or bookkeeping tool.
Pre-Approvals: Q-Card requires purchase approvals before virtual cards for a specific purpose are issued, making sure all expenses align with budgetary goals and preventing unauthorized spending. Reduces Maverick Spend: By guiding employees to approved suppliers and discouraging out-of-policy purchases, Q-Card significantly reduces unplanned, costly buys. Refer to preferred suppliers and existing catalogues: Employees can easily be referred to preferred suppliers and catalogues during the Q-Cards pre-approval process, making sure your employees always choose cost-effective options.
The design of our interface has recently been updated and is straightforward, showing only the necessary features for a streamlined workflow, clearly labelled with an organized menu so your employees can easily navigate through the app without extensive training. Our mobile app provides access for both requesters and approvers on the go and is equipped with real-time notifications, allowing any purchase to be approved and made within seconds.
Yes! Many vendors within your tail are not important and are very time-consuming and costly to create and maintain. However, it is often company policy to do so. Q-Card is your sole vendor for all these transactions and functions as a sub-administration, ensuring you no longer have to manage these unimportant vendors, yet still have access to all the data within our easy-to-use dashboards or your underlying systems via integration. Saving your company on average about 100 EUR per vendor!
Any transaction completed via Q-Card or invoice approved for wire transfer via our Q-Card app is not subject to any manual invoice handling or processing. We make sure your vendor is being paid and All data from the purchase transaction can be automatically transferred to your ERP or accounting package through integration, including coding details, expense category, attachments, etc.
CPO Strategy - Issue 41
Heijmans & Q-Card: Constructing Procurement
Heijmans developed an influential relationship with the Q-Card App at the beginning of 2023. The firm opted for Q-Card's virtual cards to bring their spend under management. By adding Q-Card to its 2023 digital agenda, Heijmans is extending its P2P process, improving upfront visibility and cost control for a wide range of indirect spend categories throughout multiple departments.
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Get in touch
Are you looking for a more in-depth discussion about our services?
Book a complimentary workshop with one of our experts to determine the top priority for your digital transformation. This evaluation offers tangible information on the cost-benefit gained through our Tail Spend Analyzer tool.