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Comment by javiramos | Hacker News Reader

The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The process is so painful.

Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment > Receipt] process.

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Add government red tape on top of this and it can take a week or more to get a COTS part ordered from a vendor that sells all of their stuff online. Heaven help you if the vendor isn't in the approved vendor list, that's another week to get all the compliance paperwork to them and get signed. It's agonizing when you need something quick but still need to go through all the hoops because the item is technically government property.

I was working on a solution addressing this problem during my undergrad inside our university incubator (in India). Although I left it due to unavoidable reasons. But do you think the problem is big enough to worth exploring again?

The problem grows in scale as organizations grow in size or spending increases and is applicable across most industries.

The biggest challenge is finding a solution that fits workflow needs, has the necessary features, and is user friendly enough that the solution will actually be adopted.

There appeared to be dozens of choices for invoicing software, both in general and targeted at specific verticals.

What makes all of the existing offerings not usable?

You are right, there are many solutions and the existing offerings are often usable however organizations have difficulty with the implementation.

Two majors problems around proactively managing an organization's spend culture:

1) Entropy: the pain around the problem is not acute and is a slow dissent into disorder. The problem gets harder to solve as organizations grow.

2) Chosen solutions are not adopted by the team and data around company spending is lost.

Solutions need to fit current workflow or have a dedicated champion with authority to insure adoption.

What part of the process is painful?

Please send me an email, same issue in my firm, keen to discuss. I may have a solution.

I’m currently working on a solution for this.

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