Paid

Why should you care about your tail?

Tail spend is often seen as the elephant in the procurement room. Who has time to get deep into the weeds of tail spend in today’s challenging environment? And why would they want to? At Paid we’re on a mission to create equal opportunities for businesses of all sizes to work together. We see a host of benefits that can be seized from taming your long tail, and the best place to start is with defining the problems that are uncovered when you begin to delve into the tail.

Trusted by the likes of: BT, Bouygues, ISS

Get started with compliance

With so many small suppliers collaborating with your business, it can be hard to maintain compliance, making it harder for procurement teams to have full confidence in their supplier base, and more complicated for suppliers to onboard and work with a larger business, stifling growth and pushing costs higher.

With Paid, small suppliers are onboarded in as little as six minutes, all whilst ensuring compliance and controlling costs. Our procurement automation platform takes care of KYC and AML checks, and gives you the freedom to configure various surveys, evidence and legal contracts for your suppliers to complete before they start working with you.

Understand what’s going on

A concern for procurement professionals is knowing exactly what's in their long tail. The rise of maverick spending through purchasing cards, incorrectly tagged spend, and the sheer volume of transactions happening in the long tail make it a nightmare to understand. Add to this the pressure from finance teams to get this under control, and it’s easy to see why visibility is a core issue.

Person looking at phone with metrics sketch in background

The long tail doesn't need to be the black hole it so often seems. Paid comes with a powerful procurement analytics suite to address this issue. Out of the box reports provide insight into your entire long tail spend, broken down by type, supplier, department and requester. Being able to see where spend is going, which way it’s trending, and investigating outliers enables procurement teams to react and generate cost savings. You can also build your own custom reports to get a 360º view across your supplier base.

Setting up the right processes

Employees want to be empowered to purchase the things they need without jumping through hoops and being stuck in bottle necks. Procurement teams can facilitate this by giving them the freedoms they need to purchase, whilst maintaining compliance and control.

The Paid platform is built on a powerfully configurable, intelligent workflow engine meaning your long tail purchasing can benefit from process automation and approval chain management. Easily assign various tasks to the right stakeholders or departments meaning everyone has the visibility and control they need.

Transparent payment options

Smaller suppliers want flexibility in how and when they are paid, and organisations want to avoid the overhead that comes with each invoice. This is even more under the spotlight with the introduction of the Prompt Payment Code (PPC) which states that small businesses must be paid within 30 days.

One of Paid's earliest features was the ability for suppliers to benefit from same–day payment using our Express service. We can also aggregate all invoices received into a single payment for the enterprise, reducing the amount of work needed to comply with the PPC and become a preferred client for suppliers.

With Paid you have greater control of how employees spend with our virtual payment cards. Virtual cards offer increased security, with each set of credentials being a unique purchase, making it much more difficult for card numbers to fall into the wrong hands. Maintain all the insight from spend analytics, and the compliance from the onboarding flow with the flexibility of a purchasing card.

The audit trail

Reviewing procurement contracts, processes, and history with vendors to ensure accuracy, compliance, and improve efficiency is critical to a modern procurement team’s effectiveness, and business success. Taking a holistic look at the activity within your long tail is critical to identifying irregularities and decreasing the risk of fraud.

Every action performed within Paid is recorded in a secure, versioned audit trail. Contracts, amendments, requests, and approvals are all documented and available to review and export for full traceability and compliance.

Using Paid in practice

Companies like BT and ISS are already seeing the impact of using Paid to manage their long tail spend. Processes are more efficient, confidence is higher, and resources are freed up making enormous cost savings.

There’s no reason your tail spend shouldn’t benefit from the same rigour and visibility that your strategic spend does. Paid also integrates with your existing ERP system to ensure everything stays in sync and avoids data silos.

Managing the long tail with Paid