Purchasing KPIs you shouldn't have to email for

The email you send every month to find out what you spent

It's usually short and always much the same: "can you send me this month's spend by supplier?" You send it to finance, or to whoever runs the ERP, and you wait. Sometimes it comes back the same day. Sometimes it comes back two days later, right after the meeting you needed it for.

The problem isn't the person answering you. It's that you're asking by email for something that should be in front of you when you need it. These are the five numbers that, in a mid-sized company's purchasing function, shouldn't require you to ask.

1. What you spend with each supplier — and how much rides on one of them

Cumulative spend per supplier is the basic figure, and it usually exists somewhere. What's normally missing is the other half: what share of the total sits with the top three or four.

That concentration is what tells you whether you have real room to negotiate or whether, in practice, you can't walk away from the table. And it shifts on its own, without anyone deciding it should: one category growing for a few months is enough. If you only look at it when the contract comes up for renewal, you're seeing it when there's little left to do.

2. What you actually pay versus what you negotiated

You agreed a rate. The question is whether it's being applied.

Between the agreed price and the price that ends up on the invoice sit freight charges, annual revisions, line items that fell outside the agreement, and rush orders someone placed without checking. None of these is scandalous on its own. Added up across a year and hundreds of order lines, they show.

Seeing the gap between agreed price and price paid, by supplier and by item, is the KPI that most often uncovers money that was quietly leaking out.

3. What's still to arrive, and how much of it arrives late

An open order is a purchasing figure, but operations is what feels it. And when the tracking lives in a spreadsheet someone updates by hand, the two versions never quite match.

You need two numbers here: what's ordered and not yet received, and what share of last quarter's deliveries landed on time, supplier by supplier. The second is what turns an awkward conversation with a supplier into a conversation with evidence on the table.

4. Savings to date against the year's target

If you have an annual savings target, you probably calculate the whole thing when it's time to justify it. Which is to say, too late to correct course.

Savings accumulated month by month, set against the pace you'd need to get there, is a number that changes how you work: in March you can still do something about it, in November you can only explain it.

5. The spend that happens outside the contract

Some purchases get made without going through the framework agreement. An urgent need, a supplier someone already knew, an item that wasn't in the catalogue. The day's problem gets solved and nobody looks at it again.

That off-contract spend almost never shows up in any report, because it doesn't fit the structure the other figures are viewed through. And it's exactly the one worth seeing, because it points at where the purchasing process isn't being used: either the catalogue has fallen short, or the workflow is slow enough that people route around it.

What to do about it

None of these five numbers is hard to calculate. They all come from data your company already has, usually spread across the ERP, a spreadsheet or two, and somebody's inbox.

The hard part is keeping them current without a person rebuilding them by hand every month. And that's precisely the part that can be automated: connecting the sources you already use, checking the figures against the last close, and letting the dashboard refresh itself without depending on anyone remembering.

I automate exactly this kind of report. The first meeting is one hour, free of charge — it's there to see what data you already have available and whether this is worth it in your case, before you commit to anything.