Top 5 smart business buying tools administrators should know about

Whether you’re purchasing supplies for a few employees or managing procurement for thousands of individual buyers, some of the challenges faced by administrators remain, such as maintaining compliance, cash flow, and efficiency.

Here are five smart business buying tools that Amazon Business account administrators should know about and start using today:

1. Guided Buying

Guided Buying enables account administrators to drive purchasing compliance, steer buyers, and maximize cost savings.

Administrators can configure buying policies to drive their buyers to specific products, such as products with sustainability certifications, or preferred sellers. Buyers spend less time figuring out what they are allowed to buy, while procurement teams save time responding to employee queries about buying guidelines.

Recent updates allow administrators to restrict products by specific keywords in a product’s title or description, instead of restricting only by categories. Administrators can also prevent buyers from purchasing from certain sellers, possibly due to past issues with shipment, product quality, or even safety.

Guided Buying is available to all Amazon Business customers, with additional policies available exclusively to Business Prime customers. Learn how to configure Guided Buying policies below.

2. Amazon Business Analytics

This suite of features empowers administrators to identify opportunities to take action within their account, optimizing spend and making better purchasing decisions. Instead of spending time collecting data, administrators can get the information they need by downloading and/or filtering one of the many available reports, such as orders, shipments, and reconciliation.

Notably, administrators can take advantage of the Automated Spend Summary, a series of emails deployed on a monthly basis that provide a deeper understanding of spending and savings. Additionally, administrators with a Business Prime membership can tap into the Program Dashboard to view program spend metrics to track against goals, or view additional data visualizations with Spend Visibility.

Learn more about Amazon Business Analytics below.

3. Pay by Invoice

Pay by Invoice can help administrators to improve cash flow management, transparency, and control via compliance with your PO process. Subject to credit approval, Pay by Invoice provides more flexibility and control with 30-day payment terms (and up to 60-day terms with Business Prime).

Administrators can customize invoices through the group level configuration to better align to your organization’s specific reporting needs. Administrators can also bulk download up to 2,000 invoices on Amazon Business Analytics for more efficient reconciliation.

Further, credit memos can be automatically applied to any open balance on the original invoice first, which saves more valuable reconciliation time for administrators, who no longer need to send Amazon remittance instructions for how to apply their credit memos.

4. Business Giving

Business Giving is a simple and efficient way to give items to employees, partners, clients, and beneficiaries, without the administrative overhead. Administrators create their own campaigns, pre-fund vouchers with their preferred payment method, set a redemption timeframe, and curate a catalog of items that recipients can choose from.

Recipients choose their preferred item from the campaign and delivery location. This provides flexibility to recipients to choose the item they appreciate most, while still allowing administrators to maintain control over selection and spend.

Get started with Business Giving.

5. Your Catalog

Your Catalog, available to Business Prime Enterprise members, allows administrators to easily manage the purchasing process for buyers through a curated selection of approved products, displayed on your own customized front page on Amazon Business.

While your buyers can save time by shopping from this simplified catalog, you can gain more control over the buying process for the organization.

Set up Your Catalog now.

These are just some of the innovative tools available on Amazon Business that can help you drive greater efficiency in your day-to-day work. Discover more tools here.