Procurement
Internal purchase request
Get the five facts a buyer cannot start without: what, how many, roughly how much, from which budget, by when.
Why this survey gets sent
“Someone asks for ‘a laptop, urgently’. No budget line, no price, no idea what it is for. I spend two days on email turning that into something I can actually buy.”
An internal purchase request fails in one direction only: too thin to act on, then a week spent collecting the rest by email. The answer is not a longer page. It is a page that insists on the handful of facts a buyer cannot proceed without, and leaves everything else to the conversation that follows.
What is in it
- Requester, work email and department
- What is needed, described in the requester's own words
- Quantity, and estimated total cost
- Budget line or cost centre
- Needed-by date, and why it is needed now
- New purchase, repeat order or renewal? (single response)
- A preferred supplier and a quotation, if either exists (optional)
About 6 min to answer
Internal purchase request
About 6 min
How to write this survey
Ask for the need, not the product name
The strongest request describes a job rather than a product. “A laptop” commits the buyer to a laptop. “Three machines that can run the design team's editing software” lets the buyer find the same capability for a third less, or discover that two are already sitting in storage. Word the question as “describe what you need to buy” and give it a long answer box, never a single line.
People will still write a model number, and that is fine — keep it. The point of the long box is that anybody with a reason to explain is allowed to, and the one request in ten that needed explaining is exactly the one that would otherwise have been bought wrongly.
Quantity and cost are two fields, not one
Ask for the quantity and the estimated total cost as separate number fields. A single “cost” box collects a unit price from one person and a total from the next, and once both are sitting in a column nobody can tell them apart — least of all the person building next quarter's spend figure out of them.
Say “estimated” and mean it. A requester who believes the number is binding will either research it for an hour or leave the request unsent. Requesters are not buyers: the estimate exists to tell you which approval track a request belongs on and how urgently it needs quoting, not to be read back to anyone later.
The budget line is what makes it real
The budget line is the field people leave empty, and it is the one that decides whether the request can move at all. Ask for “budget line or cost centre” rather than “budget”, because those are the words printed on the report the finance team actually reads, and a requester who recognises the words is a requester who fills the field in.
If a third of your requesters do not know their cost centre, the fix is a closed list per department rather than an open box: you already hold the codes and they do not. A field that only the sender can get wrong is a field you should have filled in on their behalf.
Ask for a date, not an urgency level
“Urgent” is what everybody selects by the second week, and a priority list on which every line is urgent sorts nothing. A date is checkable, sortable and negotiable — you can call a requester and agree on the following month. A priority label can only ever be escalated.
The date also tells you what to do next. Something needed in nine days and something needed in three months are the same request on two different tracks: the first goes to a supplier you already have an agreement with, the second has time to be quoted properly by three of them. Narrow the pickable window so nobody can request a delivery date that has already passed.
This page records a request; it does not approve it
There is no approval chain here — no routing to a line manager, no sign-off box, no second signature. Pretending otherwise with a “manager approved” checkbox that nobody verifies is worse than saying so plainly, because it manufactures a record that looks like an approval and is not one. Approvals keep running wherever they run today: a delegation matrix, a finance system, a signature on a printed page.
What the page does do is make the approval short. A manager asked to approve a described need with a quantity, an estimate, a budget line and a date is answering a question. A manager asked to approve “a laptop, urgently” is opening an investigation. Tell requesters on the page that a complete request is approved faster — it is true, and it is the only incentive that has ever worked.