An operator of welfare and education services across several companies
No purchase without a budget line
A group operating welfare and education services received a single multi-company budget and a procurement process that enforces it — from order, through goods receipt and invoice, to payment.
- Priority ERP
- Budget control
- Procurement
- Multi-company
This customer is described by organisation type, as agreed with them.
- Sector
- Welfare and education services
- Status
- Running in production across every company in the group.
The challenge
When a group runs several companies, each tends to develop its own practice. Suppliers get created twice under different names, item codes are written differently in each company, and budget lines do not speak the same language. The result is not a declared absence of control but an inability to compare.
Why a standard implementation was not enough
Adding a budget report would have solved nothing, because the problem sat upstream of reporting — in the data and in the process. Budget control almost always fails at the same point: not in the report, but at the moment someone can go around it.
Architectural approach
The work began with cleansing: consolidating suppliers across companies, cleaning item codes into consistent names, and validating price lists. The annual budget was moved out of a spreadsheet structure into a multi-level hierarchy inside the system, with account mapping for every line across the whole group. The work procedures written for the group — following recognised quality-management practice — set rules that leave no room for interpretation.
What was delivered
- A single hierarchical multi-company budget
- Cleansed supplier, item and price-list data
- A full procurement process: order, goods receipt, invoice, matching, payment
- Every stage of the process linked to its budget line
- Work procedures and user guides
- Budget reporting available to management