Blog

Field notes on spend, suppliers, and getting to an answer.

Practical writing for procurement and finance teams who want clarity without a six-month project. No gated PDFs.

How many IT vendors do you really have — and why your ERP can’t say

Ask your ERP a simple question and you get silence. Here’s why the system that records every payment can’t tell you what you actually buy.

Read →Deduplication

The same supplier under four names: finding duplicate vendors across your ERPs

Grainger shows up four times, across three systems, as one company. Multiply that across your vendor master and your “biggest supplier” may be hiding in plain sight.

Read →Data quality

Why “98% classification” doesn’t survive contact with your vendor master

Every spend tool quotes an accuracy number north of 98%. No real vendor file is that clean. Here’s how the number is built — and what to look at instead.

Read →Getting started

Spend analytics when you have no budget, no IT time, and no consultant

The three reasons spend analytics never happens are always the same. None of them have to stop you anymore.

Read →Spend analysis

Your indirect spend is bigger than you think — and harder to see

Direct spend gets watched. Indirect — the long tail of everything else — is usually most of your vendors and a big share of the money, hiding in the part nobody owns.

Read →AI insights

One dataset, four lenses: the same spend, written for each seat

Procurement, finance, and risk look at identical numbers and need completely different answers. The data is the same; the read isn’t.

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