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Before You Hire a Buyer: 5 Faster, Lower-Cost Ways to Control Spend

2 Min. Read Time

Keivan Shahida
Keivan Shahida
Co-founder & CEO @ Response
Image of job description for a Buyer with the word "WAIT" written across. Title "Before you hire a buyer" written unobstructed above the job description.

Spend is getting out of control. Invoices are piling up. Basic questions like “What did we spend on boxes last month?” can’t be answered. You know you’ve got to do something about it. But you don’t have time. This is manual grunt work. It’s not the job of a finance or ops leader. Most companies in this situation default to the obvious solution: hire a buyer. But adding headcount just delays the inevitable and builds even more complexity into your process. You’ll add payroll cost, layer in approvals, and still be left with patchwork systems that can’t scale. Before you post that job description, here are five faster, lower-cost steps that can give you control of spend without hiring a buyer.


1. Put an Approval System in Place

Most spend chaos comes from decentralized decisions. Facility managers, supervisors, and ops leads order what they need, when they need it – without finance visibility. Even a lightweight approval step (email, Teams, Slack) creates a checkpoint that stops rogue purchases before they hit the books.


2. Give Teams a Simple Menu of Preferred Options

Ops doesn’t wake up excited to shop vendors. They just want what they need, fast. Instead of letting every site reinvent the wheel, build a short “menu” of approved vendors, SKUs, or categories. This makes it easier for ops to order consistently – and for finance to manage spend.


3. Centralize the Intake

Scattered emails, texts, and phone calls are the enemy of visibility. Create a single intake path – whether that’s a shared inbox, form, or (better yet) chat-based system. When requests come through one channel, it’s much easier to track, code, and approve spend.


4. Automate the Paperwork

GL coding, invoice matching, and reconciling POs to payments is tedious work – and it’s exactly what eats up the time of a buyer or AP clerk. If you can automate even part of this process, you free up hours per week while improving accuracy.


5. Leverage a "Digital Procurement Officer"

This is where many companies stop – they add a buyer, set up a procurement tool, and hope ops will use it. But the truth is: most procurement tools fail because they require habit change. Your ops team doesn’t want to learn a new portal. That’s why we built Response – a Digital Procurement Officer that meets your team where they already work (email, Teams, Slack, and even text). Instead of hiring, Response becomes your buyer:

  • Building orders

  • Routing approvals

  • Coding spend to GL accounts

  • Placing the order

  • Reconciling invoices and syncing to your ERP

Finance gets control, visibility, and compliance. Ops doesn’t have to change a thing.


The Bottom Line

Hiring a buyer adds cost and complexity. But before you make that hire, you can put systems in place that give you control today – and scale with you tomorrow. With Response, you get the outcomes of a procurement team, without adding headcount. 👉 Thinking about hiring? Talk to us first.