A procurement time audit measures the work around a real order: checking stock, preparing the PO, handling the supplier reply, receiving and preparing the finance handoff. Start with your own times rather than a claim about how many hours every small business should save.
Track a complete cycle
Pick representative suppliers and record active work as it happens. Keep waiting time separate: a supplier taking two days to confirm does not mean a buyer worked on the order for forty-eight hours.
Use one row per work session:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Order and supplier | PO 1042, Supplier A |
| Activity | Review partial-fill proposal |
| Person | Buyer |
| Active minutes | 6 |
| Volume | 8 order lines |
| Outcome | Accepted six cases now; two still pending |
| Rework | Corrected a case-to-unit mismatch |
Also log shared tasks, such as a stock count serving several suppliers, once. Multiplying the same stocktake by every supplier inflates the baseline.
Separate decisions from duplicate entry
Some work protects the business: checking condition at receipt, approving a substitute, confirming spend authority and reviewing an invoice. Other work repeats an existing fact: copying a supplier's ETA into a spreadsheet or entering the same quantity into three tools.
Software can assist both, but do not assume review takes zero minutes or that a POS feed replaces physical counts. Measure the operator's actual time with the proposed workflow.
A worked comparison
The following is an illustrative pair of comparable weekly cycles, not a LineNow benchmark:
| Activity | Baseline active minutes | Pilot active minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Shared stock review | 40 | 35 |
| Build and review POs | 65 | 40 |
| Send and confirm orders | 25 | 20 |
| Review supplier changes | 35 | 25 |
| Receive and record variance | 55 | 50 |
| Prepare finance handoff | 30 | 20 |
| Total | 250 | 190 |
The difference is 60 minutes for the comparable cycle, a 24% reduction from the 250-minute baseline. At fifty such cycles and an assumed $35 per hour, it represents $1,750 of annual capacity value. It is a payroll cash saving only if paid costs actually fall.
Do not extrapolate until order count, line count and exception mix are comparable. Keep setup and training time in the investment calculation. If the pilot had fewer deliveries or easier suppliers, adjust the comparison or collect another cycle.
Include quality in the result
Track misrouted orders, quantity corrections, duplicate sends, short receipts and unresolved invoice differences. Faster work is not a success if errors increase or controls disappear.
Measure handoff quality too. Ask a second employee to explain the order without the original buyer's help. Can they identify the current commitment, the source of a change and who acts next?
Decide what to improve first
If most time goes to item mapping, clean the catalog. If it goes to supplier messages, test a shared supplier order workflow. If it goes to receiving discrepancies, improve the receiving process. If it goes to accounting corrections, agree on mappings and document ownership with finance.
LineNow connects orders, replies and receipts so that facts can be reused across the cycle. A trial should show which duplicate steps disappear and which review responsibilities remain. Use the ROI model to combine the measured time result with actual costs and other benefits without double-counting.