You're new to your procurement role and have inherited suppliers.

It means becoming responsible for agreements, suppliers, or spend that were never properly governed, usually without a handover and often without any record of what exists, or at least where to find it.

It falls to whoever owns supplier relationships, and in some cases, they're the first person to be in the role. When a new procurement lead picks it up, they didn't create it, and in many cases, nobody had pulled everything together in the first place. There are usually three situations:

• No reliable count of suppliers

• No clear owner against each relationship

• No views of what renews or lapses

A messy system is still a system: the information exists, it's badly organised, and one determined afternoon improves it for everyone. What you have inherited is often a different story because the information was never captured in a system of truth, so there is nothing to tidy. Figuring out what you have is the job itself at first.

No one can answer questions about your inherited suppliers and contracts because of where the documents are stored. 

Filing is just one of the organisation's problems to address. The real problem is that no one unified the decisions. 

The suppliers check, the agreed terms, the money that went out, and what came back. Someone recorded each somewhere for their own purposes.

Reorganising documents doesn't fix that. You can put every agreement in one folder, name them consistently, and still not be able to say whether the supplier you pay has current insurance or whether you've ever claimed the service credits you negotiated. 

You're earlier on then, working through best practices. The most useful practice at this stage is finding where the joins are missing before standardising a workflow you don't have yet.

You often hit three common breaks before you standardise your workflow.

• Due diligence and the contract

• Signature and delivery

• What you agreed and what you pay

What breaks between due diligence and the contract?

Someone likely did initial supplier checks: a credit report, a security questionnaire, or a reference call. Usually the problem is that the concerns raised never made it into the agreement as a clause, condition or right to audit.

The organisation carries a risk once identified but now forgotten. So the evidence of the check is there, but there's no trace of it in the contract.

What breaks between signature and delivery?

A signed agreement is a list of promises in both directions, and most require action afterwards. 

• Provide an annual certificate

• Hold a quarterly review

• Notify you before a price rise

Once the contract is filed, those commitments go quiet, nobody follows up, and the value negotiated stops arriving.

What breaks between what you agreed and what you pay?

You never checked whether the rate you negotiated matched the rate you were charged. Somebody won a tiered discount, a capped uplift or a set service of credits; the agreement was filed, and the invoices arrived. Nobody has compared the two since. 

• A volume tier was reached eighteen months ago and never applied.

• An uplift capped at CPI that came through several points above it. 

• A rebate that triggers annually and has never been invoiced for.

• Service credits negotiated but not once claimed.

Growth outpaced the process.

The process was broken, or a rule existed that nobody followed. Buying happens around you, with people raising their own purchase orders. The same supplier appears three times under slightly different names, and nothing is formally closed.

There's a temptation to publish a new rule because it feels like progress and costs nothing to produce. Though it usually backfires, and you'll find yourself in the same loop.

A rule nobody can enforce, applied to a process nobody can see, teaches the business to route around you, and an ignored policy is worse than none.

Earn the right to set rules by being the person who can already say who bought what, from whom, and on what terms.

A predecessor left or retired.

Expect the paperwork to exist and the reasoning behind it to be gone.

• Why that supplier was chosen

• What was agreed verbally alongside the contract

• Which relationships are fragile

• What the last renewal settled

• What was traded to settle it

Start with what only they knew, and treat it as decaying data. The people who worked with your predecessor still remember those conversations, but they'll remember them less well each month, so document and record the conversations before you build the spreadsheet.

If they left behind two systems, or a configuration nobody understands, hold off on deciding whether to fix or replace it until you know what it contains and whether that information is still correct or outdated.

Explore our 90-day plans to help you organise your data. 

This largely depends on how much you already know about the suppliers and contracts you inherited.

If you can't name your suppliers yet or say what renews next, the first month is discovery rather than delivery. Explore our questionnaire and 90-day plans to build an action plan. 

Though, your first two weeks should focus on establishing your renewal and notice-period exposure. This is the only part with a clock attached, so any delay has a price, and it needs nothing more than access and a spreadsheet initially to work out potential upcoming renewals. 

Work backwards from money and from people.

Ask finance for the last 12 months of supplier payments, sorted by value: anything material enough to matter is paying somebody.

Then take the top 30 by value and ask whoever owns each relationship two questions:

• When does it end

• What notice do we have to give?

The answers may be patchy, but it will still show you which agreements sit closest to a deadline.

Chase the contract itself only where the answer is uncertain, and the value is high. Reading everything could take a month with little return; reading the six that matter most will take an afternoon. 

Keep as few fields up to date as you can. Supplier, what they do, internal owner, annual value, end date, notice period, where the document lives.

That answers the questions you will be asked, and it's the reason to resist a twenty-column version: a tracker with too many fields decays within a month, and a decayed tracker is worse than none. People will trust it, and it’s much easier to maintain.

A spreadsheet is the right tool at this stage. Plenty of organisations run a serious operation this way for a year before moving, and tracking contracts in a spreadsheet is a legitimate interim as long as you are honest about it being one.

A shared board with columns for what is coming up, what is being chased and what is settled beats a more elegant system you have to ask for budget for early on. Once you can see the pattern, you can get ahead of renewals and stop them from becoming a series of emergencies.

Anything without a deadline or material exposure.

• Duplicate supplier records

• Inconsistent naming

• Documents in the wrong folder

• No template library

These are real problems, but they're not urgent, and every hour spent on them is an hour not spent on the thing with a date attached.