Source to contract, run as one cycle

Source-to-contract decides what you buy, from whom and on what terms. Procure-to-pay is the transactional half that follows: requisitions, purchase orders, receipting and invoices. The handover point is the signed contract. Run both together and the whole thing is called source-to-pay.

No. Source-to-pay is source-to-contract plus procure-to-pay. Vendors often use the terms loosely because their software spans both. If you are comparing providers, ask which end of the cycle they staff, because a lot of source-to-pay pitches turn out to be a repository and an invoice workflow with nobody running the sourcing.

Keeps the sourcing calendar moving. Reviews the contract register for what expires, builds the case for which categories go to market, prepares and runs the events, models the bids, writes the award recommendation, prepares the signature pack, files the executed contract with its key terms abstracted, and works the renewal list ninety days ahead.

Yes, provided the authority stays where it is. We recommend and prepare. Supplier selection, contract signature and delegated authority stay with you, and your counsel keeps legal review. If a provider offers to select suppliers or sign on your behalf, that is a different service with a different risk profile and it should be priced and governed accordingly.

No. We are not lawyers. We prepare the commercial schedules, flag terms against your own playbook and position, and package everything for your legal reviewer. Legal drafting and advice stay with your counsel or your outside firm.

Two models: a fixed fee per sourcing event, or a monthly fee for a retained analyst running the calendar. We quote after the free audit, because the honest number depends on how many events a year you run, how complex the categories are and the state of the contract register. Anyone quoting before seeing those is guessing.

No. Gainshare sounds aligned and quietly is not. It pushes effort toward whatever is easiest to record as a saving, and it turns the baseline into an argument at exactly the moment you want a straight answer. A fee keeps the incentive on doing the work properly.

It helps, but the evidence suggests it is not the binding constraint. World Commerce & Contracting and Deloitte, in The ROI of Contracting Excellence in June 2023, found that 78 percent of organisations had made some investment in contract lifecycle management over the previous five years, while the average value erosion it measured stood at 8.6 percent of contract value against a 9.2 percent IACCM baseline from 2014. Software stores contracts. It does not chase a renewal or write an award paper.

The most credible public figure is 8.6 percent of contract value on average, from World Commerce & Contracting and Deloitte's 2023 research across more than 1,200 organisations. The best performers ran at a little over 3 percent, the worst above 20 percent. We will not predict your number before the audit, but the spread tells you the work is worth measuring.

For a straightforward indirect category, roughly six to twelve weeks from opportunity to award recommendation, plus your negotiation and legal review. The Hackett Group measures this as business days from an end user communicating a requirement to the signing of the supplier agreement, and its July 2025 research puts Digital World Class organisations 24 percent faster than peers. Most of that gap is dead time, not skill.

You do, throughout. It is built in your systems or in a structure you can export in full at any time, and the abstracted key terms are yours. We will not put your contract book somewhere it can only be reached through us.

Against a baseline agreed in writing before the event runs, and reported in a way finance can reconcile rather than a spreadsheet only procurement believes. Where a saving is a cost avoidance rather than a reduction in the ledger, we label it that way. Mixing the two is how savings reports lose their audience.

They go on a dated calendar with the notice period on it, and we work them ninety days out. That is the single most common source of value quietly leaking away: a contract that renews on last year's terms plus an uplift because nobody served notice in time.

No, and it is usually not where to start. Strategic sourcing, RFx coordination and category management are sold separately and each has its own page. Buying the whole cycle makes sense when the problem is that nobody owns the calendar, rather than that one event needs help.

SAP Ariba, Coupa, Jaggaer, Ivalua, Zycus, GEP, Icertis and DocuSign, plus the SharePoint and shared drive arrangements a lot of mid-market teams actually run on. We work inside your system rather than asking you to adopt ours, so there is no migration and no new licence.

Access is scoped by you, granted to named people, and revoked through your own leaver process. We contract on standard clauses, name every sub-processor, and work to GDPR, UK GDPR, PIPEDA, the Australian Privacy Principles and Saudi PDPL. Pricing and contract terms are handled under confidentiality obligations that survive termination. ISO 27001 alignment is in progress and SOC 2 Type II is on the roadmap. We state status honestly rather than showing badges we do not hold.

You keep the contract register, the repository, the templates, the models and the SOPs, because they are yours the whole way through and they sit in your systems. Transition out support is written into the contract from day one rather than negotiated when you want to leave.