My first task as an intern at Heineken was raising purchase orders, accepting goods receipts and checking them against incoming invoices.
I worked in marketing, not finance. But this was the one job nobody in our department wanted to do.
To be clear: I wasn't ordering glass bottles or malted barley. Just agency work and marketing goodies, about as simple as a purchase gets. Still, almost nobody followed the process, because it was so laborious. You had to get into SAP, fill in fields nobody had explained to you, and hope you didn't hit an error that no one could decode.
Years later I see the same thing in almost every finance team we talk to. The process isn't followed, so something gets added to make people follow it. More guidelines. Another checklist. Carrots (compliance lands in someone's targets), and sometimes sticks.
It rarely works, and it's worth being precise about why.
Why the process exists
Go back to first principles. Why does the PO process exist? To approve spend before it happens and to track commitments and inventory. Not to frustrate people in their daily job, and not to run a process for the sake of process.
Once you lose sight of that, every fix becomes a rule. And a rule laid on top of a process nobody understands or wants doesn't get followed.
A few examples from practice:
The PO nobody raises
Invoices arrive without a PO. Matching fails, coding becomes guesswork, and the accrual is wrong.
So a mandatory PO policy goes in. No PO, no payment. And because the policy has to be safe, raising one takes ten clicks and eight approvals.
What people actually do is order anyway and raise the PO after the invoice lands, if at all. Now you have retro-POs, which are a record of a decision already made rather than a control over it. The policy is followed on paper and violated in substance. Your PO compliance report says 94%, and your matching rate says otherwise.
Support looks different. Raising a PO takes as long as sending the email you'd otherwise send. It's pre-filled from the vendor and the contract, routed to one approver who actually has the authority, and approved in Slack, Teams or wherever people work. The compliant path is the fast path, so it gets used.
The approval threshold that got lowered
Money went out on something nobody remembers approving.
So the approval threshold drops from €5,000 to €500, and a second approver is required above €2,500. Reasonable on paper. It produces roughly six times as many approvals.
What people actually do is approve in bulk on Friday afternoon, forty at a time, without opening a single one. The control now runs at 100% compliance and 0% attention. That's worse than having no control, because everyone believes it's working. The one invoice that mattered was approved in the same batch as thirty-nine that weren't worth a glance.
Support makes approval scarce again. Anything that matches its PO, its contract price and its vendor goes through without a human. What routes to a person is the exception: a new vendor, a price that moved, a possible duplicate, spend off-contract. Four approvals a week that actually get read are worth more than two hundred that get clicked away.
The vendor form with fourteen mandatory fields
Payment fraud in the sector, duplicate vendors in the ledger, a bank account that turned out to be wrong.
So a vendor onboarding form goes in. Fourteen mandatory fields, a bank-details verification step, and a five-day SLA before the vendor can be used.
What people actually do is find an existing vendor record that's close enough and push the order through it. The old entity of the same supplier, or the "diversen" account, because procurement needs the part this week. The control designed to clean up master data becomes the biggest source of dirty master data in the ledger. And the fraud risk didn't get smaller, because the workaround skipped the verification entirely.
Support means the form fills itself from the KvK and VAT registers, the bank account is verified at the source rather than with the requester, and the vendor is usable within the hour. You didn't ask the requester to be diligent. You did the diligence for them.
The pattern underneath all three
Something fails. Control gets added, because control is the only lever most finance functions have. That control puts friction on the compliant path and never on the workaround. Behaviour shifts to the workaround. What went wrong keeps going wrong, now with a report saying it doesn't.
Control assumes the person is unwilling. Almost always they were unable, or the compliant path cost them twenty minutes they didn't have. That was true of me at Heineken, and raising that purchase order was literally part of my job.
So support them instead
What if the answer isn't more control, but support in following the process? Working out of NetSuite or SAP is daunting if you're not in it every day, and writing another instruction guide is a plaster on a wooden leg.
Why not make it ten times easier and let people chat to an agent in Slack or Teams that takes the right steps for them? You describe what you need in the channel you already work in. The agent knows the vendor, the contract, the budget holder and the coding rules. It raises the purchase order with the right details already in it, sends it to the one person whose approval actually means something, and writes it back to the ERP. The person who needed to buy something never opens NetSuite at all.
That's what a system of action does. It sits around your ERP rather than replacing it, because the ERP is the record and it should stay the record. What's missing is the layer that acts on it: reading the contract, checking the goods receipt, resolving the difference, chasing the one approval that matters, writing the booking back. Exact, NetSuite and Dynamics were built to store the truth. They were never built to go and get it.
And the outcome is exactly what that control was always after. Purchase orders raised before the spend rather than after. Compliance that's real instead of reported. Master data that stays clean because nobody had to work around a form to do their job. All of it without a hundred screens out of somebody's afternoon.
At Claridy we're building the systems of action that put support over control.
PS. The two screens above are real, and both are still in use. If you wonder why they look like they came out of the nineties: that's because they did.
Last checked: 2026-08