What most people running small businesses using QuickBooks sooner or later realize is that they need to use Purchase Orders to help them automate their purchasing processes so that they can control who is buying what, streamline the purchasing process, and stop chasing the various notes and lists of what’s been bought from whom while waiting for the bills to arrive. While QuickBooks offers a basic Purchase Order feature, it doesn’t allow management to control the limits of those POs, or pre-authorize them, before their issued. In other words, the QuickBooks Purchase Order system is pretty much just an automated way to prepare paperwork.
If you are only using QuickBooks, there simply is no way to maintain strict control of your business purchasing process and that means you don’t have a handle on what’s being spent. Unless you happen to be using QuickBooks Online Advanced, you just don’t have the option of any sort of ‘workflows’ related to Purchase Orders that most growing businesses want or need. But now there is an easy-to-use Cloud-based Purchase Order App that works with QBO to help you ‘Spendwise’ by resolving all these limitations.
For more on this topic, join us for the Insightful Accountant hosted webinar, ‘Growing Your Advisory Services and Recurring Revenue Stream with Spend Management Solutions’ on May 18, 2021, at 2:00 PM Eastern. This 60-minute webinar, presented by Gaynor Meilke, MS, CBC, will explore the practical tools and processes you can use to grow your advisory services and a recurring revenue stream with spend management tactics and tools. REGISTER HERE.
Spendwise Purchase Orders let users enter all the information they need regarding their proposed expenditure, then save and submit it for approval to the purchasing authority within the company. (Source: Spendwise)
Spendwise gives you the tools you need to create, approve and send Purchase Orders to your vendors while at the same time ensuring that all spending by your business is properly authorized before a purchase commitment has been made. Business leaders can control not only which employees have purchase-making capabilities, but who also can see purchases already made, along with reports related to the business-to-vendor financial relationships.
The Spendwise Dashboard provides a snapshot of the spending and allows users to manage approvals. (Source: Spendwise)
Another feature of Spendwise is the ability to create budgets based on Groups. I know, you are asking what a ‘Group’ is? Well, when you are using QuickBooks with Spendwise a Group corresponds to a QuickBooks ‘Class’. So, you can establish budgets for various intervals (monthly, quarterly, yearly, or total), and then by Group, as well as by your accounts along with the periods related to the intervals (each month if monthly, each quarter if quarterly, etc.). This gives you an enhanced budgeting capability related to your purchasing commitments, and expended funds in relationship to budget costs.
Spendwise lets you easily search, sort, and filter purchase orders as needed to identify your purchases by any of your designated groups, or individuals submitting the purchasing requests. (Source: Spendwise)
Spendwise also provides the ability to manage vendor bills in advance of payment and to allow management to review and approve those bills before their processing. One of the key functions is the ability to keep tracking of what the vendor is invoicing in comparison to what has been received and also what was ordered on the original Purchase Order. This 3-way matching capability is one of the major features that Spendwise offers businesses that need to be able to track both goods and services they acquire.
When it comes time to process those vendor bills, and all the check-n-balances along with the appropriate approvals and controls have been met, those bills can be easily transferred to QuickBooks from Spendwise with the click of a button.
So, you may wonder about the integration with QuickBooks Online? It’s not a lot different than any other App you might find in the Intuit App Center, it works via the same OAuth2 connectivity that you normally go through when connecting an App to your QBO file. You can sync key information like the Chart of Accounts, QBO-Classes with Spendwise Groups, Vendors, Customers, and Items by using the Spendwise Settings > Integration function and then click the ‘Sync Now’ button. Once you have done that when there are additions or changes to Chart of Accounts, Groups, Vendors, Customers, or Items in Spendwise they will automatically be synchronized to your QuickBooks Online account within a few seconds. When there are additions or changes to Chart of Accounts, Classes, Vendors, Customers, or Items in your QuickBooks Online company they will automatically be synchronized to Spendwise within no more than ten minutes.
Now you are probably wondering how you can find out more about Spendwise because obviously, you are a ‘wise spender’? Well first, you can either head over to their website homepage, or you can book a demo, or start a free 30-day trial. Of course, you might be exploring via QBO or the QuickBooks App Center and want to give Spendwise a look via that route, so their Intuit App Center Landing Page is always another route to access the information.
But another way to orient yourself regarding Spendwise is by attending the Insightful Accountant hosted webinar, ‘Growing Your Advisory Services and Recurring Revenue Stream with Spend Management Solutions’ on May 18, 2021, at 2:00 PM Eastern. This 60-minute webinar, presented by Gaynor Meilke, MS, CBC, will explore the practical tools and processes you can use to grow your advisory services and a recurring revenue stream with spend management tactics and tools. REGISTER HERE.
Disclosure:
App Aware articles are editorial features, they are NOT sponsored content. While they may (or may not) contain references or 'inserts' that refer to sponsored content, or sponsored webinars, or the vendor's website(s), the actual feature is intended as an informational resource for our readers, not sponsored product promotion.