Agile and controlled: How to Successfully Structure Your Procurement Processes

Balancing necessary control with operational speed is one of the biggest challenges in financial management for medium-sized businesses. Too much bureaucracy paralyzes the ability of specialized departments to act; too little control endangers liquidity and compliance.

Especially in times of economic tension, one principle applies more than ever: every euro counts. But saving doesn’t mean slowing down processes with complex application forms. It means creating intelligent structures that allow agility where it’s needed and enforce control where it’s critical.

As a provider of all-in-one software for spend management, at finway we see ourselves not just as a technology supplier, but as a partner on equal footing. Even more so: We are our own “super user.” We use our software daily to scale our own processes. In this article, we share our internal best practices and show you what a modern procurement structure looks like in practice—far removed from theoretical models.

The “Dog Food” Principle: How We Manage Our Expenses at finway

We firmly believe that you can only recommend what you successfully use yourself (“eating our own dog food”). Our internal finance processes are set up to be maximally efficient without our accounting team losing control.

We strictly distinguish by the type of expense. For each expense type, we have defined a specific workflow that offers exactly the right balance of freedom and oversight.

The Background Workflow: Approval, Review, and Payment

Intelligently structuring expense types is just the first step. Efficiency comes from automating the downstream steps. At finway, invoices and orders follow a clear path that eliminates sources of error.

Automated Approval

Our workflows are granularly customizable. A rule we use, for example, is: “All invoices from Supplier X are automatically approved unless the net amount exceeds 500 EUR. In this case, Person Y must approve.” This drastically reduces the number of clicks for management, as only exceptions require manual attention.

Technical and Accounting Review

After approval, the process doesn’t end up in a folder but in the “Review” status. Here, our finance team checks the receipt purely from an accounting perspective: Is the tax rate correct? Is the VAT ID correct? Is the cost center pre-assigned correctly? Only after this qualitative check does it proceed.

Seamless Payment and Booking

This is where the circle closes to liquidity.

1. Matching: If the invoice has already been matched to a card payment, it is automatically marked as “Ready for Export.”
2. Payment: If payment must be made via bank transfer, this happens directly from finway. Through our bank integration, we synchronize transactions in real-time. A SEPA payment is matched directly with the bank transaction.
3. Tags: We use custom tags like “international payment” to have maximum transparency in later analyses.

Conclusion: Stay “In Control”

A modern finance department doesn’t have to be a bottleneck. By properly differentiating between small expenses and strategic investments, and using software that automatically enforces these rules, you create a culture of responsibility.

You give your employees the tools to work quickly and agilely without ever relinquishing control over liquidity. That is exactly our aspiration at finway: Smart spend management adapted to the realities of medium-sized businesses.

Let’s work together to ensure that every euro in your company is used efficiently.