Many companies now opt for digital procurement as a key long-term cost-saving strategy, emphasizing the increasing significance of procurement reports (purchasing reporting). In this guide, we define and highlight the importance of purchase reports, offering templates and guidelines for effective procurement report writing.

Note: The report and dashboard examples in this article are all built-in templates made by FineReport, the leading BI reporting tool in the Asian-Pacific region.

1. What is a Procurement Report?

Procurement reports, namely purchasing reports, are used to uncover how procurement activities occurred within a selected date range to create value for enterprises.

Typically, a procurement report includes purchase information of goods and/or services, available budgets, and so on. However, the responsibility of the purchasing manager involves more than simply managing the purchasing of the company’s supplies. They play an essential role in the long-term realization of business cost-effective strategies and supply chain management.

2. Samples of the Procurement Report

Purchasing analysis is usually represented as dashboards, reports, and data graphs, analyzing the company’s spending on suppliers by category or location. In the procurement report templates made by FineReport below, we often explore the following indicators and metrics: 

• purchase amount
• purchase channels
• accounts payable analysis
• supplier analysis
• purchase price analysis

The following example contains the profit and category contribution rate, the sales, and directions for the next stage of the procurement plan.

By confirming the procurement punctuality rate, the purchasing manager can understand the work efficiency of the purchasing staff and perform performance management.

3. How to Create a Procurement Report?

The procurement process faces challenges like slow approval, tied-up funds, and high process costs. A well-designed procurement report enhances financial forecasting accuracy and vendor relationships.

Thanks to the development of BI software, making enterprise-level procurement reports is much easier and more effective. To make a well-oiled purchase report, I recommend you develop first a clear design thinking and then choose a proper reporting tool.

3.1 Target Audience for Procurement Reports

It is necessary to show the company’s overall purchasing situation to the purchasing decision-makers, including the monthly report about the purchase amount, purchased products and other indicators, so that the purchasing decision-makers can understand the global status of the company’s purchasing in a report.

Typically, procurement leaders will report to one of three C-suite executives, CFO, CEO, and COO.

3.2 Purchasing Reporting/Dashboards & Key Metrics

Purchase amount analysis: You can understand it as the financial analysis of the purchasing department, mainly analyzing the allocation of purchase funds and whether the assignment is reasonable. The study of the purchase amount is usually presented in the form of reports.

Procurement plan and forecast: This report analyzes the execution ability of the procurement staff and summarizes the rationality of resource allocation to improve efficiency further. Typical indicators are planned purchase volume, actual purchase volume, and purchase completion rate.

Purchasing process efficiency analysis: This kind of analysis is often displayed with a dashboard to discover and analyze potential problems in the procurement process. Issues are usually drawn from comparing different departments, business units, and processes to optimize inefficient processes.

Supplier management: Financial capability, cost, product qualification rate, service satisfaction, delivery speed, etc., are several key indicators commonly used in supplier management.

4. A Conclusion of the Procurement Report

Procurement reports and analysis allow organizations to quickly obtain a comprehensive view of their procurement expenditures and activities.

How to make Procurement Reports？

The efficiency of procurement reports and analysis is directly related to the ability of the procurement team to select the correct data analysis method and have the necessary tools to collect, clean and enrich the procurement data accurately.

If you choose FineReport, you merely need to be familiar with Excel operations and understand simple coding, and you can easily design various reports. There is no need to learn multiple complicated programming languages such as Java and PHP. Only with simple SQL can you develop enterprise-level reports. If you are interested, you can try it for free.