Every one of your top 20 vendors should be brought out to bid every year, even if the renewal isn't happening that year. No, you're likely not going to switch from NetSuite to Sage or Workday this year, but you'll never get the best pricing if you don't evaluate the market. Yes, this requires work and a project team to assemble the right data and ask the right questions.

Such a fun Boston evening with Procurement Foundry and NPI last night. Discussions ranged from adventurous Halloweens past, to new purple rounded logos, to Procurement’s priorities headed into the end of the year:

How do you show more savings to your CFO? 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀. Whether you're in procurement, ops, or within a business unit, getting visibility to your upcoming projects and renewals is a critical prioritization exercise people don't spend enough time on.

I sent out the note below as part of my investor update recently. If you want your AI to tell you about budget variances and accelerate FP&A, logging your input data in a structured way is a key building block! Let's chat more if you want to get a better handle of vendor spend and data!

Trying to solve budget issues and vendor management in your AP tool is like getting 10 band aids to cover a severe burn wound. Especially if your company is growing, you should: 1) Have the right people in procurement and finance to tackle problems strategically. 2) Re-evaluate the tool kit and technology you're arming these people with to solve the problem.

To my finance friends who are on 𝚅̶𝟸̶𝟹̶ V24 of their 2025 budgets, please do yourself (and your companies) a favor by checking the vendor spend assumptions before locking in your budgets. For those of you lucky enough to have procurement teams, work with your procurement leaders to review assumptions for top 50% of vendor spend. -Does the seat count assumption seem correct? -Does overall contract value increase/decrease make sense? -Do we still need this vendor?