Software Procurement Best Practices for Mid-Sized Companies
A practical software procurement process for mid-sized companies: intake, catalog check, tiered approval, contracting essentials and handover to SAM.
By the MI Solutions SAM team10 min read3 exhibits
Large enterprises have procurement departments, sourcing teams and contract managers. Mid-sized companies usually have a finance manager, an IT lead and whoever needed the software. That works until the software list grows to hundreds of products, half of them bought on cards.
You do not need an enterprise process to buy software well. You need five simple steps, applied consistently.
What goes wrong without a process
01Duplicates
Three teams buy three tools for the same job, each at list price.
02Bad terms
Click-through contracts with auto-renewal and no price cap.
03Lost contracts
The agreement lives in one person's inbox; nobody knows the notice date.
04Data risk
Customer data in a tool nobody reviewed for security.
The five-step process
Exhibit 1
1. One front door
A single short request form: what the need is, how many users, the budget, and what data the tool will hold. If it takes more than five minutes, people will go around it.
2. Check before you buy
Look at the approved catalog and existing contracts. Often the organization already owns a tool that does the job, or has unused licenses for it.
In practice, the catalog check alone resolves a surprising share of requests without any purchase:
Exhibit 2
3. Tiered approval
Tier
Example
Approval
Low
Under a set amount, no sensitive data
Manager, same day
Medium
Moderate cost or internal data
IT and finance, within a week
High
Large spend or customer and personal data
IT, security, finance and legal
Most requests fall into the low tier, which is why tiering keeps the process fast:
Check the 25 contract terms that matter most: notice period, auto-renewal, price caps, data protection, termination rights and audit clauses.
5. Hand over to SAM
Record the contract, owner, renewal date and notice deadline in your SAM system the day it is signed.
Handover record for every new contract
How MI One helps
Frequently asked questions
Should every purchase go through procurement?
Every purchase should go through the front door. Low-risk, low-cost requests can be approved almost instantly.
How do we stop people buying on cards?
Make the approved route faster than the card, and review card spend monthly.
Who should own the approved catalog?
IT, with input from security and finance. Keep it short and searchable.
See where your software budget goes
Bring your five largest vendors to a 30-minute call. Our SAM experts will show you where the savings usually hide, and how fast MI One can surface them.
