An efficient purchasing process is essential to smooth business operations. Companies need equipment and materials to run effectively — employee computers and keyboards, the raw materials necessary for making products, the printer paper that helps you take care of basic office tasks, and so much more.
That’s why creating internal processes that outline how to request and receive approval for making a purchase is an important part of keeping your business organized.
This is where a purchase requisition comes in. Understanding the purpose, benefits, and use of these documents can help your team stay coordinated and maintain an airtight purchasing process.
A brief introduction to purchase requisitions
So what is a purchase requisition exactly? It’s an internal document that details purchase requests from an employee or department and travels throughout an organization in an approval workflow, ensuring a defined review process before company money is spent.
Purchase requisition examples
Purchase requisitions are a widely used type of documentation. These documents formally request the purchase of goods and services an organization needs. Here are some examples of purchase requisitions:
- Upgraded employee laptops, requested by IT
- Office supplies, like pens, notebooks, and sticky notes, requested by an office manager
- Software subscriptions for design programs, requested by the head of the design department
- Updated textbooks for students, requested by a teacher
- Marketing collateral for an event, requested by a marketing manager
In each of these examples, an employee would submit a purchase requisition for review and approval, outlining the relevant goods, services, and prices.
Purchase requisition documents require a few key pieces of information:
- Date of the request
- Person making the request
- Vendor name, address, and contact information (phone number, email address, fax, etc.)
- Description of goods and services
- Item quantity
- Cost of each item
- Total cost
While your purchase requisition may include a variety of details, using these basic fields as a starting point can help your team accurately track key information.
Purchase requisition form template
If you’re looking for an easy way to get started on your next purchase requisition, use this form template from Jotform to jumpstart your process. It’s easy to customize the template to suit your needs with Jotform’s intuitive drag-and-drop Form Builder.
The benefits of using purchase requisitions
Purchase requisitions are precursors to purchase orders sent to vendors and suppliers, and they help business owners effectively take stock of supplies and track expenses. Here’s how they can keep your company efficient.
Ensure detailed records
A purchase requisition is an important part of procurement, the process by which a business obtains goods or services for its operations. Properly filing purchase requisitions shows you how many supplies you need, how often you need to replenish them, and how much they cost.
This knowledge comes with a few perks. First, it’s always good to have detailed notes regarding where your company’s money is going and how much inventory you have. It also keeps employees accountable.
Your business shouldn’t treat purchasing casually — after all, there’s a reason you create a budget at the beginning of the year. Without proper expense tracking, procurement can easily veer off course and mess with your end-of-year projections.
A purchase requisition paper trail keeps purchases transparent. If you make sure your team accounts for each purchase and multiple managers approve purchases, you’re going to be more organized. By understanding where your money is going and why, you’ll be able to cut down on unnecessary expenses and possibly save some cash.
Establish better communication
Having employees document their purchases and supply requests is just good business sense. That’s why a purchase requisition is so helpful — each one tells the story of where requests originate so you can discuss purchasing needs with the right department heads.
Purchase requisitions also allow you to optimize your procurement process and determine how your workflows could function better. Plus, a purchase requisition approval process streamlines communication within your business. The more you stick to the process, the more efficient you’ll be at moving your requests from one department to another.
Fostering this trust within your business is also good for company culture. If everyone knows what their role is and who to check with for approval, you can establish a clear structure for purchasing and eliminate any confusion as to who’s in charge of buying what.
Prevent fraudulent transactions
Purchase requisitions ensure a record of supply orders and cash flow, creating an official purchase history. This history ensures you can catch any faulty or fraudulent purchases and deal with them.
A business that doesn’t keep detailed notes of its expenses could be prone to unauthorized orders from inside and outside parties. Having accessible records is the best way to address these problems.
Establishing clear roles within your company that identify who has the power to sign off on purchase requisitions adds another level of security. A business where a single employee has the power to order important supplies on their own without checking with anyone else is probably not going to operate effectively.
Instituting added security measures in an automated workflow curbs unnecessary spending and ensures a smooth purchasing process.
Improve supply management
Despite your best intentions when determining supply needs, there’s a chance you’ll make a mistake now and then. For example, if you need equipment to manufacture your newest product but two people in your organization reach out to a supplier separately, you might end up with more than you need — as well as an unexpected hole in your budget.
Proper purchase requisition measures could catch this error before it happens. Knowing how much employees are requesting and when will save you from major headaches.
Challenges of purchase requisitions
Purchase requisitions play a critical role in the smooth functioning of an organization, which is why it’s so important to get the process right to ensure the accuracy of your records. There are a few potential issues that you’ll want to keep an eye out for:
- Incorrect information: Manual data entry is often a source of mistakes; after all, human error is possible in any manual function. Errors in your purchase requisition process could lead to inaccurate budgets, unplanned order numbers, and missing information.
- Lack of visibility: If your team doesn’t have a way to quickly and easily share purchase requisition forms with those who need to see them, your purchasing process can run into unexpected approval delays and conflicts.
- Inefficient workflows: Your purchase requisition form creation and approval process will ultimately determine how beneficial these solutions are for your organization. If your workflows are confusing or overly complex, your purchase requisition forms can take too long to get through the approval process — costing you time and resources.
To minimize the chances of errors and streamline workflows, your team can automate their purchase requisition process.
How to automate the purchase requisition process
Automation allows your team to avoid many of the issues associated with manual purchase requisitions. While there will still be an element of human interaction, automated purchase requisitions can save time and prevent errors.
The easiest way to automate your purchase requisition process is by using a workflow automation platform, like Jotform Workflows, that integrates forms, automates notifications, and ushers a payment request through the whole process seamlessly.
Workflow automation allows your team to smoothly transition purchase requisitions from one phase to another without sacrificing efficiency or visibility. Building an effective workflow for your purchase requisition process will create a repeatable structure that minimizes the effort your team has to expend to achieve accurate and efficient results.
Steps in the purchase requisition workflow
To begin implementing a purchase requisition workflow, you’ll need to find a workflow automation software that can help facilitate your new process. Solutions like Jotform Workflows will make it easy for your team to create a workflow that suits your needs.
Jotform Workflows offers a variety of benefits that simplify the purchase requisition workflow creation process:
- A no-code, drag-and-drop workflow builder
- Conditional logic and parallel processing
- Integrations with third-party applications
- Real-time tracking
- Workflow templates
While your workflow may vary depending on your organization’s existing procedures, here’s an outline of standard purchase requisition workflow steps:
- Submit a purchase requisition form: At the start of every purchase requisition, a team member will need to fill out a purchase requisition form with the appropriate information and submit it. Using a standard purchase requisition template will save time and ensure consistency across the process.
- Purchase requisition review: The submitted form will go to the designated approver — perhaps a manager or an accounts representative. This person will review the purchase requisition form.
- Purchase requisition approval and order creation: Approved requisition forms will then be turned into orders, which are sent to designated vendors.
- Order delivery and approval: If an order is for physical goods, the next step is to wait for delivery of the requested items. A team member will need to inspect items upon delivery to ensure there’s no damage and that the items are correct in both type and quantity.
- Invoice submission: Once the delivery of the goods has been completed or the service has been rendered, the employee will submit an invoice confirming receipt. The invoice will be reviewed, and any final payments will be made.
Depending on the nature of your business and your purchase requisition, these steps can vary, or additional steps might be called for — inventory checks for recurring orders, for instance, or additional approvals for large expenditure requests.
Tracking and automating all of these processes can be a daunting task, but with the right tools, running purchase workflows can be simple.
The benefits of using Jotform to track purchases
Jotform is a powerful online platform that supports creating and managing forms and workflows. Customize a purchase requisition form template or easily create your own from scratch, and integrate requisition forms into custom automated workflows with just a couple clicks.
Automating this process eliminates the need for paper documents and allows you to keep everything in one place. Jotform Workflows lets you create tasks, assign team members to them, automatically trigger notifications about task assignments and completions, integrate your workflows with other platforms, and even include payment processing software directly in your workflow.
Customize a purchase request workflow template or build your own from scratch with the intuitive drag-and-drop builder.
Jotform Workflows will help you design clear communication channels and ensure that your purchase requests and orders go off without a hitch.
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