Testimonials

'It's really useful because we can look at the information from all different angles and it's so easy to use,' says Ms Hamilton. 'It will help us rationalise and standardise our suppliers and products, which in turn means we can get better prices.'

Vicki Hamilton, The Head of Procurement and Supplies for the Outer South East London Shared Procurement
London Procurement Program


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Data Collection

The purpose of the data collection is to establish the total spend for your organisation, and identify the items which were purchased.

This is achieved by collecting data from both the Accounts Payable (AP) and the Purchase Order systems (PO), plus additional supporting information.

Input files

Five types of files are supported:

  1. Supplier.
  2. Purchase Order.
  3. Invoice.
  4. Catalogue.
  5. Contract.

The columns supported in each of these files, and the meanings of these columns, are described in detail below.

Purchase order data

A row in a typical PO file gives:

  • date,
  • order number,
  • supplier,
  • product part number,
  • product description,
  • quantity ordered,
  • unit price, and
  • total.

Accounts payable (invoice) data

Product information is not normally available in AP systems, so a rowin a typical AP file consists of just:

  • the date,
  • invoice reference number,
  • supplier, and
  • amount.

However, where you do have line item detail in AP data, full use can be made of this.

Minimum requirements

These two files – the PO file and the AP file – areare the minimum requirement for a run of SpendInsight.

Additional data

Additional supporting information helps SpendInsight establish the true identity of products (catalogue or contract data) or suppliers (supplier information database).

Often this supporting information will be a part of a separate extract. SpendInsight is fully able to link data together from multiple sources.

Simple CSV file format

The standard input data format for SpendInsight is CSV, where:

  • Each line of the file contains a record.
  • The fields of a record are separated by a comma.
  • If the value in a field contains a new line character or a comma then the value must be enclosed in quotes.
  • If the value in a field contains a quote then the quote must be escaped by repeating it.
  • The first record contains your column names.
For example, the first few records of a PO file might look like this:
DateOrdered,OrderNo,SupplierName,SupPartNo,Description,Quantity,UnitPrice,GrossTotal
25/1/10,o1,ACME,aws,ACME standard widget,5,£3,£15
25/1/10,o2,ACME,aw2,'ACME widget, type 2',5,'£3,000','£15,000'
25/1/10,o3,ACME,aw-s,'ACME 'super' widget', type 1,5,£3,£15

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