Take Your P2P Further with These 5 Hacks

Basware Connect events provide us with the opportunity to share insights on the latest fintech innovations and keep our customers up-to-date with Basware’s newest features. Here are five useful Basware solution hacks to help make a huge difference to in your purchase-to-pay (P2P) process.

During Basware Connect events, we get the opportunity to show off the latest and greatest solution features as well as receive valuable feedback from those who use our solutions on a daily basis. The main goal? Constant optimisation.

After discussing what customers need and want to improve their purchase-to-pay process, we settled on these top 5 simple, yet effective, Basware hacks.

1. Using Icons in Guided Purchasing

Recently, we introduced new functionalities into our electronic procurement solution, focusing in particular on Guided Purchasing. Let’s start with the simplest feature: icons. It might seem obvious, but if you want to drive someone to buy the right product, images will make the process clearer and therefore quicker.

We even conducted an experiment at one of our Connect events. We wanted to see how long it would take people to purchase our headphones -- without using an icon. On the whole, it took participants over a minute, and some couldn’t complete the process at all without asking for help.

We added a headphones icon to make it more obvious. Simple.

After implementing the icon and making the journey more intuitive, users were able to complete a purchase in a matter of seconds.

So, if you’re getting feedback from users that they don’t know how to purchase something, or where to find certain items, start using icons, a built-in feature in our procurement solution. You’ll have people going to the right place in a matter of a few clicks, making their lives - and that of the approvers’ - a little bit easier.

2. Using Product Tags in Guided Purchasing

This hack also has to do with Guided Purchasing, but this time in relation to Product Tags. Customers using catalogs in Marketplace will find this very useful, and again, it’s a simple solution that can make a huge difference in efficiency.

The concept behind Product Tags is that as a buyer, you can decide which tags you want to assign to individual items. The tags can be used to drive people to a specific item, like laptops. Let’s look at an example:

Your business is in the process of overhauling their tech and employees are purchasing new laptops. Some opt for a Dell, others a shiny new Macbook Pro. This poses a problem, as for obvious reasons you don’t want everyone to go for the most expensive option.

This is where product tagging comes in.

You can use Product Tags to guide people to the ‘right’ item and actually limit who can see certain products, giving you a higher level of autonomy over the process. Hiding unnecessary items also enables you to be more strategic in your approach and increase compliant spend.

3.  Buyer-Generated Content

Hack number three relates to Buyer-Generated Content and is a procurement trick for customers in the world of AP. When Marketplace was first created, one of the main concepts behind it was to enable suppliers to ‘push data down.’ However, realistically, there are going to be some suppliers who aren’t going to be able to provide that content for you due to time constraints, etc.

This means you have to generate the content as if you were the supplier in the form of ‘bio-generated’ content. The Agent Agreement is the main link between the buyer and supplier and it now enables you to provide as much content or information as you want, making the process more transparent, especially if there are multiple people working on it.

4. Adopting Email-Based Approvals

Conversations around how to streamline the invoice approval process have been abundant. In response to this, we’ve designed an email-based approval system that enables the user to approve an invoice with the click of a button.

One obvious benefit to this is that it speeds up the process significantly. That said, there is still a need on some occasions for users to go into the system to access the full invoice details. It’s really about achieving that balance between driving the right behavior and making the process more straightforward.

On our system, customers perform over 750,000 approvals every month, and if a small percentage of those people choose to instantly approve them on an email, it would speed up their processing tremendously.

5. Implementing Automatic Supply Routing

Next up is Automatic Supply Routing. In some cases, invoices are sent to a group of people in a cost center as opposed to an individual. That’s great, but it can lead to complications and even instances of delayed payments due to individuals within the group assuming that someone else has taken care of it. Now, we’ve made it so that the invoice can be rerouted to a specific individual, enabling the user to maintain the data and create workflows.

This hack allows you to focus on setting smart goals at a higher level while enabling the users, those operating the system, to optimise it and make it easier.

To summarise…

At Basware, we’re always finding new and innovative ways to improve our processes in order to equip our customers with the technology they need to thrive.