How Paid is automating Procurement with Natasha Foster
Hey Procurement Legends, I had an awesome chat with Natasha, the COO of Paid which is a Procurement automation platform. I’ve pulled a technical extract from their website below so that you can get an idea of what the platform is.
I do encourage you to check out their product and think about how it may help you in your day-to-day procurement work.
Natasha is incredible, she gets it and it’s clear that she is in the business of solving business problems first and foremost. It just happens that these sit within the realms of procurement.
You’re going to love this one.
Check out the transcript below.
What is Paid?
Paid is a workflow management solution that allows a business (the “Client” of Paid) to invite suppliers and issue work requests to the supplier. Work requests then receive a response from the supplier, either to accept or decline. Once accepted by the supplier (which is done via e-signature so the acceptance creates a contract subject to specific terms and conditions), the Paid software provides the tools to manage the completion of the work (via a completion notification by the supplier to the Client through the Paid platform, and confirmation by the Client via a ‘completion confirmation document') with any evidence needed to be provided by the supplier (specified in advance by the Client as part of the initial work configuration). Finally, once completion has been confirmed, the Paid software automatically generates invoices on behalf of the supplier and optionally provides supply chain finance (i.e. ‘faster payment’ to the supplier).
Paid is available online at [Clientname].paid.co.uk
Features
Invite suppliers to the platform
Performing KYC and AML checks on suppliers
Contract creation through workflow and templating
Electronic contract delivery to the supplier for electronic acceptance with an e-signature
Amend contracts and re-issue with changes
Workflow to manage the completion events of work and the collection of any appropriate digital evidence
Invoice generation and payments to suppliers *if chosen
Reporting on work spend
Transcript
00:02
Daniel Barnes
Welcome to the World of Procurement podcast. I'm your host Daniel Barnes. Today, this is such a cool episode with Natasha from Paid. It's a pretty cool platform that automates a whole bunch of, well, a whole bunch of things regarding onboarding the purchase order, invoicing elements, and even contract elements. And Natasha from paid is a wow. That's for some of your smaller, long tail suppliers, more for an enterprise solution and it's a really cool solution. It's one that I, I guess it came on my radar maybe earlier this year, maybe March time. That's where some of your smaller, long tail suppliers, more for a an enterprise solution is a really cool solution is one that I, I guess it came on my radar maybe earlier this year, maybe you March time. I started looking into it and thought it was pretty cool. Natasha and I have been wanting to do this podcast for a couple of months and between schedules and illnesses and things like that we, finally got to talk on the Podcastt.
00:51
Daniel Barnes
We finally got to talk on the forecast. I think you're really going to enjoy this while when you're going to find out about Natasha, her background, what Paid is, what, how it works, how it operates, some of the challenges that it looks to solve. I think it's a really cool episode, I think is really cool product that you should definitely have a look into that. I think it's, yeah, this is the kind of stuff that gets me excited in this space. Stick around to the end, listen to it all. You're really going to get a lot out of this podcast episode. My only ask actually, if for any of you listening, is that we just set up the World of Procurement community on discord, such an exciting place. We're going to have real time conversations there. We're going to have maybe a few exclusives events within the server and all the details while at least the link to that server is in the description below.
01:43
Daniel Barnes
You can click through, depending on where you're listening to this podcast to go to the website where we're have order details around the show notes for this episode and the water procurement discord community server. Yeah, enjoy this episode and I'll see you real soon, my friends. Natasha, great to have you on the podcast.
02:09
Daniel Barnes
And, we've been talking for the last couple of months to make this happen. I'm actually just gonna hand it over, straight away to yourself, just so you can, well, actually for me, like were just talking, it'd be really good to get your background just initially, and then we can talk about Paid, as well.
02:28
Natasha
Yeah, sure. I, I actually come from a very large corporate background. I started my career as a lawyer, working in finance in New York and London. I moved into banking, and used to be in advisory for finance and oil and gas companies. I mean, honestly, probably nowhere near procurement. I didn't have to do, I was never a buyer. I do recall one, situation I'm in, that I talk about quite a lot actually, because I think it opened my eyes to what it's like to be a big corporate and to have to try and buy something from a small supplier. I was in oil and gas, and we used to use, petroleum engineers to assess assets that were maybe gonna, lend money against. We usually have those people in our team. We had, an in-house facilities management, but for whatever reason, we didn't have that person didn't have enough capacity to look at some assets we needed looking.
03:31
Natasha
We had to get, find an independent person. Just like a single person who was going to provide about 5,000 pounds worth of services and a report. It took all together more time, my time, plus all the people talking to the point where it cost us a lot more than 5,000 pounds to onboard and get the work from this person than they do to actually get the work, because we obviously also paid him 5,000 pounds for the, so I was thinking about that in the context of, what we do now, trying to avoid ever being in that position and other companies having to be in that scenario. That's my connection to procurement, I guess, before I, co-founded Paid and we are obviously a procurement automation platform, but, I got there because I, I left banking, wanting to do my own thing, and actually met Tom about a year later, having spent a year, advising small companies, and specifically advising them around stability of cashflow business process.
04:47
Natasha
The fact that the two were basically intrinsically intellect. If you didn't have good business process, then you couldn't feel comfortable about your cashflow because you don't feel comfortable about collecting on the invoices you are issuing to your clients. Tom and I met, through a textiles program, I was advising the companies, and he and Paid was one of those companies. He had come to the, exactly the same conclusion effectively, in the first iteration of what we built paid for, which is that, small companies working with their clients, if they don't have the right process in place to work with their clients before they issue an invoice, then they aren't ever going to feel comfortable about collecting on that invoice and con really predictably feel good about getting paid. That's how we ended up in the same place,
05:43
Daniel Barnes
The observation of, if you're trying to get like a really basic 5k order through, and then just realizing how much nonsense goes along with, I would say that more traditional manual, procurement processes. Like, I've been contracting prior to my current permanent role, I was just consulting in multiple areas and just getting around. It's the same everywhere, regardless of the size of businesses, like everything, it was just the most basic of orders. Like something like buying a printer can take an inordinate amount of time and proportion to the value of the item or the risk. Yeah. I feel like I definitely need to be, I almost think he being outside of procurement is a good thing because you see all the nonsense of procurement people get so caught up in this world of like having to do things in a set way. They, they use the volume.
06:39
Natasha
Yeah. You can see what, so I also like lawyer by trade, right? I understand the necessity of good process. You can see why as a large company, you do have to have a process in place to manage risk and to make sure that things don't get out of control. Some of the enterprises we talked to, they're working with over 10,000 suppliers and the long tail and those even 5,000 pounds, each supplier that racks up into quite a lot of costs. You can see why you want to have the right checks and balances and process in place for that. It's just the actual time it takes for a human to manually go through those processes with a small supplier who doesn't themselves, have the infrastructure on their side, set up to go through that desk. It means it becomes disproportionately costly to go through that process.
07:31
Natasha
I think that's where we think we can provide the most value is because we're not saying don't go through those processes to enterprises, we're saying go through those processes, but let us automate it. That for those lower risk suppliers, I suppose we could apply it to all suppliers, but when it comes to big strategics fives, there's always more that you always derail from that like standard process, because you're doing negotiations and so on, automate that process so that it's not a disproportionate cost to you, but you maintain those checks and balances. We're not saying procurement, you're wrong to have those checks and balances. You're not, in fact we believe in the importance of compliance. I think that's a good thing. Just, you just don't need to do it all yourself.. Yeah, I agree.
08:18
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, no, that's cool. This good opportunity right now, just to get into like, what is Paid. To me, it sounds, I, I'm not going to say what I think it is. I I'll let you talk here because to me, this sounds awesome.
08:30
Natasha
We are procurement automation platform and we help large enterprises better manage that long tail. And, and the reason how we do that is we automate the process of onboarding, contracting, invoicing, and payment for those smaller suppliers. And, and the way that we do that, as I was saying is that we take existing enterprise processes that are manual and we configure so, or our platform is dual-sided, I guess we've got a supplier platform, that supply a supplier portal, all that suppliers sign up to, more on that in a second. Then, an, a buyer side platform and the buyer side, we fully configure to conform to the enterprise's own onboarding processes and workflows. So, and automate that. Instead of let's I can talk about our own experiences onboarding to an enterprise as a small supplier. Cause that's what paid is for our software is put in place.
09:34
Natasha
We have to do the process of, manually onboarding. So, you've got various, let's say steps. You need to go through as a supplier to be onboarded as a supplier to an enterprise. The most basic things, you go in and you fill out all your company information, your company, number, your VAT details, when you were incorporated and all that thing, some of them have infrared, like ask for information about your company size, how many employees and so on, then you might fill in, then you might wait about a week for someone to review that, and then you'll get the next step in your process, which is to fill in another questionnaire about what you do. Maybe it will be just really basic. Like, what do you do to assess risk? And what are you going to do? What's what are you going to provide to the enterprise? You're going to provide software.
10:30
Natasha
Are you going to come on site? Are you going to be processing data, those things. Fill out those questionnaires, sometimes the request or the procurement side does that for you. Again, you wait another week and then you get given your followup things, financials request, data processing questionnaire, or like compliant things like, do you have any ISO certifications, that thing, certificates, insurance certificates, and other, like, what are your bank details? what's your address? all those pieces of information in a pretty, quite manual way over the course of weeks to months, let's say so with paid, what we do is we take all of those requirements and we configure them in and we put the questionnaires and two dynamic questionnaires in our system so that when a buyer wants to onboard a supplier in their, in that institution, they put in the name and email address and company name of the supplier and he create supplier.
11:33
Natasha
The supplier gets an email that says you've been invited to become a supplier to BT, on the Paid platform, click here to create your account. They create their account and their profile, and they will have a list of tasks of all the things they need to do. They can do that, in as quickly or as long as they want effectively they'll get reminders if they don't do it immediately. What that means is you take a week, so a month long process, and it becomes a day or a few days, depending on how long it takes the supplier to compile that information that they need. Effectively what we're doing is we are dramatically decreasing the manual time and therefore cost to an enterprise of onboarding and managing, the smaller, long tail suppliers, because we also do through the platform contracting, whether that's just a PO general terms or a true contract, and we will do receipting.
12:36
Natasha
This is just part of the flow. The receipting happens. We generate the invoices on behalf of the supplier and liaise with the enterprise to get paid so that the supply can be paid on time every time. Finally for the supplier side, we offer through a third party express payment so they can choose to be paid immediately on day zero, for a fee of course. So I can that,
13:03
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, that's awesome. Are you... I've been looking at a lot of suppliers, both for the podcast and at work in terms of looking at how do we automate that whole process. The onboard process at most places that I've been, like I said is awful. The question sets seem to be getting bigger by the year, like more regulation, more compliance points. To go through that manually is becoming such a tiresome activity, even just to send the right question sets out. I completely get the need for that. What I was kind of surprised about, just what you were saying there is the whole contract in with suppliers is effectively automated and the whole piece of on invoice and like that's, that definitely feels more of a unique proposition with your initial automation.
13:52
Natasha
Yeah. I think what we feel strongly about is it's just, there are quite a few tools out there that will solve for one part of the journey with a supplier. The most common thing we hear from potential clients or clients is we don't want our users to have, like ultra multifaceted confusing experience where they have to go in and out of different softwares in order to get the job done effectively. What we're trying to offer is effective from, I mean, not end to end, because we don't offer sourcing at this stage, but effectively end to end procure to pay solution for long tail. We act as if we're a master vendor in the existing system of the enterprise and they can manage all of the long tail or the scope of the long tail. They want to manage through us in our system and we'll collect and analyze all of that data for them within our system.
14:54
Natasha
They can go from, I know who my supplier is, and I know how much I want to pay them to I've paid them within our system. They don't have to access it. It will, it can all be done effectively by your mobile phone, pretty much. Contracting wise, I guess a lot of long tail is just on PO terms. I'm tried, but if you have anything, like if the supplier is processing data or they might be coming on site, you usually have some form of contract in there because it becomes a bit more complicated. We allow for that process as well. You can effectively have a workflow where you say my suppliers coming on site, okay. Suddenly you need to do a contract or, and that will just automatically happen instead of it being the PO terms. We also find, that one of the big pain points for enterprise so often it's onboarding, of course, that's like everyone complains about that.
15:50
Natasha
It's, it's just par for the course that process is it's difficult and I'm long-winded, but, on the side of receipting, when it comes to smaller suppliers, it's a two way thing, right? Enterprises have a complex process for receipting, and need to have the right people confirming that the deliverables have been provided. On this side, they may not have the infrastructure in place or the experience to know that you need to invoice enterprises in a very particular way in order to get paid, because they have this process where you need to put the PO number on the invoice and you need to make sure it has been being done before you invoice them. Otherwise, it's going to be, you probably won't get paid for like four or five months for various reasons because they haven't acknowledged voice it's wrong. We take that away by creating the invoice for the supplier.
16:46
Natasha
They know that they're going to get paid because that is automatically going to be matching. And the receipts already there.
16:52
Daniel Barnes
Such an important part of what it is, because I think the procurement supply chain people get so focused on the experience for them rather than the experience for us, the suppliers. When, like, I agree, like when I've worked with really small suppliers, but not even like necessarily really small, just smaller suppliers, they often the most common question is, oh, how do I get paid? Like how, like they see the contract, there has the terms in there, but let's be honest, contract terms can be fairly convoluted for small companies. They just want to know, like, when do I need to invoice? How do I need to invoice? Like where do I send it? And then am I going to get paid still? And like you say, with the bigger companies, from a bias perspective, that becomes such a painful experience for these suppliers, which then I guess can tarnish a lot of the relationship pieces, and then wanting to work with you.
17:44
Daniel Barnes
Long-term so I think that's really cool to.
17:47
Natasha
See. Interestingly, so, and I, I know you said, I think of course on the enterprise side, they care about the best possible experience for their users and them and the business teams and making sure that internally everyone's happy and their executives are happy in their spend management cost management, so on, but you do hear, I mean, we are working with BT and, one of the things they really care about is how can we be the best customer to our suppliers, right? because actually in an increasingly competitive environment where you want to work with the best suppliers and everyone acknowledges, right, that the innovation where you're looking for innovation, you're usually ending up with smaller newer suppliers. It's a plus point it's a way you can work with those best innovative suppliers. If you, if they know that you are going to be good to work for and they are going to get paid, really, and the relationship is going to be good.
18:49
Natasha
I think one of the, we hear a lot about that alongside corporate responsibility as well, wanting to make sure that supplier smaller suppliers get paid on time. Most of the enterprises we work with now have a specific policy around, or would like to pay that smaller suppliers on 30 day terms, not 60 or 90 day terms, that's they might historic done. Of course, if their signatories to the prompt payment code in the UK, then they have to do that anyway. So, we think that's, I guess one of the things that we're helping them with is to put infrastructure in place, so that it's really easy for them to be able to do that.
19:30
Daniel Barnes
Oh, you, I, I, I'm just looking here to see the specific word in use, I thought was really cool. It's like permissionless procurement, and this is a fact to you, like buy in without, Perkiomen like, that's how I read it. I guess that's kind of the, what's going to allow you to do that.
19:46
Natasha
Exactly. So, so exactly right. So, if you think about what were talking about, like procurement, is there amongst other things, I mean, they're there to help with strategic sourcing and making sure that you are spending with the right people, the right amount, and you're getting the best deal and so on. They're also there. And, but in order to do that, to achieve those goals, they have to put in place these processes where they're saying, can we call you can't use a supplier. You haven't already onboarded. In some cases you need to go through a tender processes. If there's a certain risk with a supply, you need to go this way and that way, and then all these, the checks and balances that were talking about at the beginning, if you've got a system and a software that effectively does all those checks and balances for you, so takes the role of a procurement person.
20:36
Natasha
You can allow the business to do the procurement. We have, in our software, you can put in procurement bonds. A business request, wouldn't be able to spend over a certain amount before it got rerouted back to procurement. You can only, you can only spend a certain amount within a certain category, or maybe, if it's a certain category, you can't use that. You can't onboard and list or create work for the new foreign until you've checked the other list of supplies. On, we can create all of that kind of compliance workflow. You have to make sure they filled out a questionnaire about GDPR. You have to make sure they fill out a questionnaire about health and safety, if they're coming on site. Also by the way, if it's health and safety, we've got an external auditor who will get automatically sent the questionnaire and we'll need to have signed off before that supplier can do any work.
21:33
Natasha
We do that where the con like can involve third parties and plug them in as needed to do additional due diligence. If you've got that in place, then, procurement can focus on other more strategic and more valuable work. And, and how great for that? I mean, we hear that as a kind of goal, I guess, an aspirational goal from the clients that we talked to, we love that idea of being able to enable, doctrine of permissionless procurement.
22:04
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. I'm the, honestly, I'm the biggest advocate of this go in, because I feel like every entry role junior role go in is doing this work, and there's no value to it. It's the most boring work as it's not very fulfilling to do as a new, I look out there and I see lots of people with roles like buyers, and I kind of feel sorry for them and not in like some yeah, just, it just because I knew the type of what they're doing, which can be like, w what you've just said, you can do it all for them, and they can just go off and learn from people doing stuff. That's actually gonna make a massive impact, and to the business. I, like, I'm not going to start to use it, like go into loads of granular detail. This question doesn't work, I'll just edit it out.
22:50
Daniel Barnes
That's the beauty of the iy in terms of pricing, what I was just thinking is like, I know a lot of these like SaaS platforms now that are doing this thing costs less than one or two or three people, it depends on the salaries of these buyers. It can be way more cost effective to have a bit of software of that, and a whole team of people doing this.
23:12
Natasha
I mean, a hundred percent we, so we price on the basis of transaction fees. You kind of effectively pay as you go. We can, from an ROI perspective, we can always make a huge case for the fact that even including our fees, it will be like a 70, 80% cost reduction. If our, if what we can show in terms of our current statistics around the time we save our clients, will be the same with future cards. So, so absolutely, I mean, it's, and that time, that's not just getting rid of headcount or whatever, you can free up that time as we've just been saying, or if you been saying, to do more interesting, more valuable work, negotiating that massive discount with a really strategic supplier, suddenly if someone has time to do that, then that is much more valuable time spent than it's time spent, re onboarding a supplier and checking their compliance.
24:18
Natasha
Yeah.
24:19
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. I, I think it's amazing, seriously. Like, this is the kind of stuff that I, when I was just sat there doing this kind of work, I was like, oh, I wish someone brought this up. Like, maybe I should have been like, oh, maybe I should bring it out, but the way to a green, back there, in terms of where, like, people can find you, like, find out more, it's like the website, the best place really to,
24:44
Natasha
Yeah. So, either on LinkedIn, so paid on LinkedIn or, the, website of paid. Okay. Okay. Obviously you can just email Natasha@paid.co.uk, if anyone is interested in a, follow-up always happy to chat to people, and both sides, right? So, obviously we sell our software to big enterprise clients, but our mission really is to create equal opportunity for businesses of all sizes. We care a lot about enabling small suppliers to work with large enterprises in the same way as they would work with a client of a similar size to themselves. Taking those barriers away from both sides to allow those, like the small, innovative agile company to work with the large enterprise company, and they get, they both get benefits from each other for being able to work with each other. So, a lot of what we do is, also trying to make their supplier experience as positive as possible, so that they can get that stability of cashflow that they really need.
25:58
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, no, that's awesome. Like, I think is, yeah, I love what you're doing just from listening to you from the hour. I looked at some of the stuff you've been up to, I saw recently on the BT sourced event, , I think you were on now, I was very aware that you are, you're working with BT source, which seemed to be doing like, Hey, like they seem to be leading the way, like following in lVodafone's footsteps steps of setting up their own procurement business to manage procurement.
26:30
Natasha
Cyril, Cyril is fantastic. I mean, if you could get him on the podcast here, be a great guest he's, he is really trailblazing in terms of, I think he's doing with BT, and his plans as, so, I'll leave that if you can get him on the Podcast. he is a really innovative guy. So.
26:52
Daniel Barnes
It's been amazing to talk to you and have you on the podcast and, yeah, just been awesome. I think a lot of people listening to this will be like, oh, it makes sense. Or that'd be really scared. They're gonna lose their jobs because we're going to automate everything, but it goes one of two ways. So, and those camps.
27:08
Natasha
Yeah, no, definitely. I think we are off the view that, automation doesn't mean headcount cuts. It means, that those people that can enjoy their job more because they're not doing administrative tasks, they're able to focus on value additive work and also their relationships. So, yeah.
27:30
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, couldn't agree more, but yeah, awesome. W awesome. Awesome to have you on.
27:33
Natasha
Oh, great. Thanks, Daniel. It was great to meet you. Thanks so much for having me.
27:37
Daniel Barnes
What's an incredible episode with Natasha from paid. I've just, I've been such a big fan of seeing the whole wave of automation, workflows, and just solving really good problems that we have as procurement professionals. I think you, well, I I'd be surprised if any of you are listening, thinking, wait, I don't want software to try and sort out invoicing or freeway matching or wait, what is the value of this? I think it's plain to all of us in this profession that this software and these kinds of solutions on the market are going to enable us to do so much more with less resources and allow us to focus on cool work at night. What do I mean by that? So diversity in the supply chain, supply ration relationship management, making sure that we've what our strategic suppliers locked down. We've got good relationships. The risk profiles are good.
28:32
Daniel Barnes
I think that I hope you really enjoyed this podcast. Like I said, early on in the podcast, it'd be cool to have you over on discord in the wider procurement community server. Once you're here, just before you click off whichever app, you're listening to this podcast on, it'd be cool to get a five star review from yourselves. This really helps us get more visibility on the podcast platforms, which in turn gets us more views and allows us to keep this podcast go. It. I really appreciate your time and attention. I hope you enjoyed this episode Lassie real soon, my friends. Good bye.