In the blink of an eye, January is over and we are already one step into February. This must have been the fastest January ever or just where did the time go?! For us, we spent the last month ensuring there’s a seamless transition from evaluating Request for Quotations (RFQs) to managing your Purchase Orders and Invoices, all on a single platform.

Our team’s focus remains singular – Building the next generation digital procurement tool for all businesses in Africa. This means working round the clock to build, push updates, listen to your feedback and push more updates.

As usual, here’s our monthly note on the updates we have been able to provide you with:

1. RFQs Listing, Republishing & Evaluation Reports

Request for Quotations was our first ever feature and we keep a really close eye on your experience using it. This month, we managed to do the following updates:

• Listing of Open RFQs – For Active RFQs, you can embed our nifty widget to make it accessible on your company website. Further, if open tenders are many, you can now list all of them on a full page within your website. Each of these will pick the information directly from your Scale account.
• Republishing of RFQs – If for some reason you get zero quotations by the time the RFQ closes (though highly unlikely) and you want to run it again, all you need to do is just review it and republish it. You won’t be required to create the bid from scratch again.
• Generating Evaluation Reports – Once a bid is awarded, you can immediately generate a comprehensive report of the RFQ process. This is critical for the auditors as well as management who provide oversight.

2. Tracking Invoices and Closing Purchase Orders plus Reports

This seamless handling of Quotations, Purchase Orders and Invoices has become popular with our users since we launched it in Nov ’22. We’ve recently made the following improvements to this feature:

• Actions on Invoices – As a Buyer, we have implemented the ability for Buyers to action of Invoices received from Suppliers within the system. You can now Accept (or Reject) an invoice after which you can also mark an invoice as Paid.
• Paid Invoices & Closing Orders – Once an invoice is paid, you can Close the Order. this indicates that the item that was requested has been successfully purchased and delivered — this marks the end of the procurement process for it.
• Generating reports on Closed Orders – After Closing an Order, you can generate a full report that covers both the Quotation and PO/Invoicing phases of the purchase. Again, this provides a critical summary for management or auditors who may be interested in the details.

Bonus update – Your dashboard is now reorganised to look cleaner and give you the most important metrics at the first view. The more your usage grows, the more insights to help you in quick decision-making.

Coming soon…

As usual, here’s a quick roundup of the updates to expect within this coming month. This time, it’s a big one that you have all be asking for:

• Direct Purchases – For those repeat purchases from a supplier where you don’t need to have multiple quotes/bids for, we are building the solution that will manage and track the process of directly issuing Purchase Orders to the suppliers. Updates coming soon!

Interested in seeing these features and more in action? Let’s set up a 20-minute appointment with you to showcase how the system can assist in achieving your procurement KPIs for 2023. That’s it for now!

RFQs Purchase Orders Invoices