How Elhogar Increased Purchasing Transparency Using ProcureDesk

El Hogar Community Services’ mission is to provide services that contribute to the mental health and emotional well-being of individuals and families in the community.

Established in 1977 as a not-for-profit organization, it today has 5 different programs to help serve the community from senior care to specialized mental health services.

Drive towards better expense visibility

When Beatrix Koev (Fiscal Director, Elhogar) joined the nonprofit in 2018, One of her key objectives was to have complete visibility into expenses.

Not only it was good finance hygiene, but Elhogar also has cost-reimbursement contracts in place with the County they serve. So the sooner they know the expenses, the sooner they can get reimbursed.

She needed the spend visibility so that she can provide complete transparency to all the stakeholders.

The purchasing process was very manual. Employees from different programs would fill in a requisition form, which was then submitted for approval via email.

This caused a lack of transparency because the Finance team won’t know what is being approved.

Driving cultural change & technology change

When Elhogar decided to automate the purchase request process, it was not just a technical challenge but a culture challenge too.

Not only that, most of the purchases were settled using a credit card. Beatrix’s team had to wait for employees to submit their expenses before they know the amount to be reimbursed.

Since Elhogar is a non for profit organization, the stakeholders required complete transparency into the Spend.

When we engaged with Elhogar’s team, the process was completely manual.

The first priority was to automate the purchase approval process. The biggest challenge was keeping the purchase approval process simple so that adoption is not a challenge.

We first started with all approvals going to the Directors and the CEO. That caused the bottleneck at the CEO’s level because she had to approve all purchases.

We quickly pivoted to self approvals by Directors so that 80% of the requests are managed at the program level.

We then looked at reducing the effort for creating the purchase requisitions. We looked at the top vendors by spend and implemented catalogs so that repeat purchases are made easier.

Learning from purchasing automation

Regarding ProcureDesk implementation – the Elhogar team said:

Making purchasing automation seamless is not solved by just implementing a purchasing tool, it is solved by working with the partner to adjust the process as per your needs.

We set up the purchasing process system and we were live within 2-3 weeks.

The team was not used to a purchase order process, so we walked them through the different scenarios and how it would speed up the time to create requisitions.

Results

They went from spending 10-15 minutes filling a requisition form to creating a purchase order request in under a few minutes.

The approval process was streamlined too because employees can see the status of purchase requests in realtime.

With the automated approvals and shifting the accountability to program owners, the approval cycle reduced by more than 50%.

The team summarizes the results as follows.