Approve.com Blog

Businesses of all sizes are waking up to the reality that spend management is something absolutely vital to an organization. We’re not talking about bookkeeping; we’re referring to the modern, automated processes businesses implement to expedite, streamline, and control their spending. As businesses scale, accurately keeping track of all financial operations becomes more difficult, as…

Nearly every business relies on third-party products and services to run efficiently. There’s no escaping that. From issuing purchase orders to generating invoices, transactions between companies often involve multiple steps and take considerable effort to finalize. Procurement is a point of weakness for many organizations. Being able to acquire the goods and services you need…

What is Saas spend management? Finance teams have a million things up in the air at all times. They are continually managing and updating a large budget, trying their best to make accurate and prudent predictions, and keeping employees working smoothly all while supporting business growth. So naturally spend management is going to be high…

There’s a lot to think about when you’re running a business. From paying salaries to analyzing cash flow to hiring new employees, you may find that your workflow is becoming more cluttered by the day.  For many businesses, optimizing core finance processes is one of the easiest ways to improve overall business efficiency and reduce…

What is procure-to-pay automation? Procure-to-pay (or P2P) automation is the method of accelerating your P2P process in order to eliminate the manual steps and time-consuming tasks that are currently involved.  Procure-to-pay is a multi-step process that companies follow in order to request goods or services, and invoice and pay the vendor providing those goods or…

Business cash flow—it’s that one phrase that anyone working in finance knows all too well. It’s also a direct snapshot of a company’s financial health.  Cash defines the ability of your business to pay its employees and suppliers and handle operational costs. It’s essentially the life blood of the company, and managing it properly is…

Financial managers always have a lot on their plates. But especially after such an unpredictable and unsteady year for so many, the start of 2021 allows us to look ahead with a bit more foresight, and perhaps the ability to put a stronger yearly plan into action. Finance departments in particular can recognize the need…

Financial management is often the primary factor separating a successful company from a struggling one. No matter the size of your organization, or what industry it’s in, excellent financial management is the key to running your business processes like a well-oiled machine. Thankfully, there are many cloud based platforms and tools available that any business…

As Marc Andresson famously said, “software is eating the world.” This is one of the most powerful and accurate business statements of the last decade. Indeed, today it’s easy to see how nearly every part of the modern enterprise is powered by software. In the past, business software centered around a few core solutions: the…

Let’s talk about purchase order creation.  Buying goods and services for yourself is pretty simple, both for you as the buyer and for the vendor. You know what you need, when you need it by, what the allocated budget is, etc. You can source the product or service from the right vendor and simply buy…

If you’re exploring the procurement and purchasing space, you’ve probably come across terms that appear similar, but aren’t the same. For example, procurement and purchasing (which aren’t the same thing).  Another example is PR and PO. A PR is a purchase requisition, while a PO is a purchase order. While it may seem like these…

The How, What, and Why of Standardizing Purchasing In the early days of a business, requisitions are a rather straightforward operation. It can be sufficiently overseen by a single finance or operations manager, especially considering the limited number of purchase requests and vendors there are to manage. This isn’t the case in larger organizations. As…