Contract Financials

[Stephen.whittle]

Hi, new to supplier manager but we are looking at utilising this for our contracts across three hospitals specifically for the Digital Services team to start with as a great way for collating suppliers, contracts, SLAs, renewals etc.

One gap I can see from a quick overview of the module is there are no specific tabs/options for tracking budget controls relating to contracts. How are others tracking this within the service if already doing so and for anyone from the Hornbill family is this something in the roadmap for oversight of budgets associated to contracts within Supplier Manager. 

Thanks in advance. 

[AlexTumber]

Hi @Stephen.whittle thanks for your post.

This is an interesting one for us as it's not something that has come up before. Upcoming features in this area are more specific to contract type and value.

Are you saying you'd like to be able to specify a budget against the parent supplier and then interact with that budget at a contract level?

Alex

[Stephen.whittle]

Hi @AlexTumber thanks for coming back so quickly. 

I now have contracts management come under my service responsibility so having met with our current contracts manager I explained the desire to get all of our three sites suppliers, contracts and SLA documentation etc all in Hornbill. When doing a very lightweight assessment of the Supplier Manager module in Hornbill this was one of the points raised. I am sure I will be coming back with some more. 

With regards to my initial questions its more for tracking that incoming invoices that we will receipt against purchase orders align with the budgeted amount within normal RPI tolerances. It's a useful visual aid to have. A different example maybe the auditability of contracts with contract change notices (CCNs) for an audit trail for budget vs invoice values. 

[Gerry]

@Stephen.whittle

How would this relate to purchase orders? is that not what your finance system is supposed to do? When you say budgeting, to you mean a kind of way to reconcile, say annual bills received with the overall, say 5 year contract value?  It is usual for public sector organizations to sign mutli-year contracts but then be billed annually - is this what you are trying to track against each contract?

Gerry


 

[Stephen.whittle]

Hi @Gerry yes you have it in a nutshell. 

When working in a group model some of the challenges are that there are multiple purchasing, finance etc systems. We were planning to use Hornbill to collate some of this information which isn't too onerous when in the supplier record to manage renewals and would give a nice aggregated view of multiple POs and budgets which in reality are in several different systems. Not essential but would work for us until the legal merge progresses for a single ledger and single systems following that. 

[Gerry]

@Stephen.whittle

Indeed, we like it, thanks for the suggestion, its added to the list and will be implemented in the coming weeks. 

Gerry

[Michael Sharp]

To add to this I think it would be helpful to have a couple of sections with fields to help build the budgeting.  We track OPEX and CAPEX separately and would be good to be able to do this in supplier manager reports without building this separately.

• OPEX
  • Billing frequency (drop down): Monthly, quarterly, annual, once
  • Value per transaction: i.e. how much monthly, quarterly, annually, once
• CAPEX
  • Billing frequency (drop down): Monthly, quarterly, annual, once
  • Value per transaction: i.e. how much monthly, quarterly, annually, once
• Projected contract spend
• Actual contract spend
• Budget SLA (auto-calculate - how much over or under budget)

As a bonus, would be good to be able to export this in almost a gant view to see contracts down the left, monthly columns, and values where they are billed.  Then perhaps the annual total/budget SLA at the end of each row (so can easily review budget SLAs down the list).

Do you do something similar @Stephen.whittle?

Regards,

Mike.