Spend visibility review

Who it is for

Buying leads and finance business partners who can export a purchase ledger but cannot honestly say, in a budget committee, which suppliers take the money and which invoices never touched a purchase order. Typical clients already have a contract register that is thinner than the invoice file.

Result you leave with

A spend map covering one financial year (or a rolling twelve months), grouped in the language your cost centres already use, plus a short pack that names concentration, leakage against contracted rates, and suppliers that appear only as free-text names. The pack is for an internal briefing, not for publication.

Scope

Included: data hygiene on the extract you send; category tags agreed with you in a kick-off call; a concentration table (top suppliers by net value); a list of invoices with no PO where POs are mandatory in policy; a comparison against the contract register you provide; one ninety-minute findings briefing (on site in the South East or by video); written notes within five working days of the briefing.

Excluded: live access to your finance system; running a tender; negotiating with suppliers; implementing a new purchase-to-pay product; legal advice on framework compliance.

Who delivers it

A named reviewer from the Toolkitroutegrid practice in Curteis' Corner, with a second pair of eyes on the concentration tables before the briefing. You will not be handed between anonymous “analyst pods”.

Process and timeline

1. Kick-off (week 1). Confirm the year, legal entities, and whether intercompany lines should be stripped. Agree category names with the buying lead.
2. Extract. You send a CSV or Excel ledger: supplier, invoice date, net amount, VAT where held, cost centre, PO number, and narrative. We send a field list in advance.
3. Mapping (weeks 2–3). Duplicate suppliers are merged where the legal name is obvious; remaining aliases are listed for you to confirm. Off-contract flags are applied only where we have your register.
4. Briefing (week 3 or 4). Closed session. We do not invite suppliers.
5. Notes. Corrections you raise in the room are folded into the final pack.

Typical elapsed time is two to four weeks, depending on how quickly aliases can be confirmed. A single entity with a clean supplier master is nearer two weeks; a group with four ledgers is nearer four.

Place of work

Kick-off and briefing can be at your offices, at 26 Seaford Road by arrangement, or on a video call. Ledger files stay on encrypted storage we control; we do not copy them to personal drives.

Preparation

Appoint one owner in finance who can re-run the extract if columns are missing. Warn the buying desk that we will ask why certain suppliers have no contract owner. Do not send payroll, bank details, or cardholder PANs — strip them before the file leaves your building.

Constraints

We work in pounds sterling. We do not certify accounts. If the ledger is cash-book only, concentration still works; contracted-rate leakage needs invoices that show a unit price or a schedule reference.

Fees

Quoted after we see a sample of twenty lines and a count of annual invoices. As a guide, a single-entity review sits in the range shown on the fees page. A deposit of one-third is due when we accept the extract; the balance is due on delivery of the written notes.

Next step

Write to the practice with the entity name, the year you want mapped, and whether a contract register exists. We reply within three working days with a scoped note or a request for a sample extract.