ThemeMoney & Finance
CardCard 48 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Procurement

Purchasing services, goods & temporary workforce

Procurement is the running record of how the organization buys things, who has authority to commit spending, and the supplier relationships that the work depends on.

In small organizations, procurement often happens informally: someone finds a vendor, signs up with a company card, and the relationship grows without ever being evaluated or documented. That works until the person who set it up leaves, the contract auto-renews at a higher price, or someone needs to understand what the organization is actually committed to spending.

The core of good procurement memory is a vendor list with enough detail to be useful: who the supplier is, what is being bought, what the contract terms are, who the internal owner is, and when the renewal or review date falls. That single document, kept reasonably current, prevents most of the procurement surprises that catch organizations off guard.

Authority to commit spending is the other piece. Who can sign a contract, who can approve a purchase order, and at what thresholds those approvals escalate are things that often exist as informal norms rather than written policy. When those norms are not written down, they tend to drift, and disputes about who approved what are hard to resolve after the fact.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Vendor register

Maintain a list of active suppliers with the category of spend, contract value, renewal date, internal owner, and any key terms worth flagging, such as notice periods or auto-renewal clauses.

Spending authority

Document who can approve purchases at different thresholds, how purchase orders or contracts get signed off, and what happens above a certain value.

Critical dependencies

Flag the vendors whose service, if interrupted, would materially affect operations, and note whether there are alternatives or backup arrangements in place.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If you listed every recurring vendor payment right now, would there be any surprises, things that are being paid for that nobody actively chose to keep?
Who has the authority to sign a new contract, and is that written down anywhere or just understood?
Which vendor relationships are critical to daily operations, and what is the plan if one of them fails or ends?
When do the major supplier contracts come up for renewal, and who owns those reviews?
How does the organization evaluate whether a vendor relationship is still the right fit, and when did that last happen?

Things to notice

Auto-renewal clauses in software and service contracts are a reliable source of unplanned spend; the renewal date belongs in the vendor register, not just in an email from three years ago.
Informal spending authority is fine until something goes wrong; the question of who approved a commitment is much harder to answer when it was never formally recorded.
Over-dependence on a single vendor for a critical input or service is a risk that tends to be invisible until it is a crisis.