Ask around about procurement best practices and you’ll hear a pretty familiar list: don’t use department or shared cards, set sensible spending limits, put approval workflows in place, restrict merchant categories that have no business showing up on a statement. All good advice, and all of it has one thing in common. It’s decided before anyone ever swipes a card or cuts a PO.
But here’s the catch: procurement controls are only as good as your ability to tell whether they’re working. Limits get worked around, approvals get rubber-stamped, and policies drift from what actually happens day to day. In fact, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that many fraud cases came down to controls that were either missing or overridden. So if best practices start before the purchase, it’s worth asking whether your visibility does too. Do you actually know what’s being bought, by whom, and how often, before the next purchase happens?
Why do procurement controls need visibility?
Here’s the thing about procurement problems: they rarely show up as one big, obvious event. They show up as patterns. The same supplies bought from three different vendors at three different prices. A department that keeps buying just under the approval threshold. Contract pricing that nobody seems to be using. Individually, each transaction looks fine. Together, they tell a story, but only if someone is in a position to see them together.
That’s what spend visibility really is. It’s not a dashboard for the sake of a dashboard; it’s the ability to step back from individual transactions and ask better questions, like:
- Are we paying different prices for the same thing?
- Are purchases going to preferred or contracted vendors, or around them?
- Is spend being split to avoid approvals?
- Are duplicate charges or duplicate payments slipping through?
Without that view, you’re more or less relying on audits to tell you what went wrong. And audits are great at telling you what happened. They’re not so great at stopping it from happening again next month.
What happens when you only look after the fact?
Let’s say, hypothetically, your program runs a thorough review at the end of each quarter. You find some out-of-policy purchases, a handful of duplicates, and a vendor who’s been charging above contract. You address them, write it up, and move on.
Then next quarter, you find more of the same.
That’s not a failure of the review; it’s a limitation of timing. When the only checkpoint is after the purchase, the program is always reacting. The best practice isn’t to review harder. It’s to put yourself in a position to spot the patterns early enough to change behavior, whether that’s a conversation with a department, a reminder about contracted vendors, or tightening procurement controls that aren’t doing their job efficiently enough.
So how do you actually get ahead of it?
A few practical places to start:
Pull your spend data into one place. Card transactions, AP payments, and PO spend often live in separate systems, which is part of why patterns hide so well. Even a periodic combined view can surface things that a single system never would.
Look for patterns, not just exceptions. A single out-of-policy purchase is an exception. The same department doing it every month is a pattern, and patterns are what you can actually fix.
Compare what you’re paying against what you agreed to pay. If you have contracts or cooperative agreements in place, check whether purchases are actually landing on them. You might be surprised how much spend drifts off contract without anyone intending it to.
Don’t forget the people making the purchases. Visibility tells you what’s happening; training helps change why. If the same issues keep coming up, there’s a decent chance cardholders and approvers simply don’t know the expectation. Ongoing Cardholder Training closes that loop, so the fixes you identify actually stick.
Where does Card Integrity fit in?
Making sure procurement controls work is what we do every day. Our Expense Monitoring service reviews commercial card transactions against 400+ alerts, and our Invoice Review service catches duplicate payments before they turn into recovery projects. For organizations that want a broader look at purchasing patterns across the whole procurement picture, Minerva Procurement AI Assistant is built to give you that view, helping you see where spend is going and where the opportunities are before the next purchase is made.
And when the data points to a knowledge gap, our Cardholder Training helps get your cardholders and approvers on the same page.
Want to go deeper?
If you’re wondering what better visibility would actually look like for your program, our Shining a Light on Spend Data Visibility eGuide walks through it in detail, from what data to look at to how to turn it into decisions. Download the eGuide below!
