17 September 2025
Preparing a category review with your finance business partner
Volume that is still a wish, sites that raise their own orders, and the one extract both of you should sign off before interviews start.
A category review dies when the volume figure in the last tender is treated as history rather than a wish. Finance can tell you what was invoiced. The buying lead can tell you what was specified. Those two files should meet before anyone books interviews with site managers.
Agree the entity, the year, and whether capital invoices belong in the same bucket as revenue. Packaging film bought as a stock item and packaging film expensed as “engineering sundries” will otherwise appear as two modest lines instead of one problem.
List every site that can raise an order, including the ones that “hardly buy”. Hardly is where the off-contract merchant lives. Ask finance for a filtered ledger and a list of cost centres that should map to the category even when the narrative is unhelpful.
Do not wait for a perfect specification archive. Missing tender reports are themselves a finding. Bring what you have, and write down who holds the rest.
If a re-tender date is already in a board paper, say so in the kick-off. A deep-dive that cannot finish before that date should be narrowed — one plant, one film type — rather than rushed into a volume schedule nobody can defend.