What to Ask Procurement in a New CFO's First 100 Days

Executive Summary

The first 100 days are the only window where a CFO can ask basic questions without looking like they're second-guessing their own team. After that, every question about vendor spend reads as an accusation aimed at whoever has owned it since.

Five conversations matter most: who owns each vendor contract and where it lives, whether invoices are checked against contract terms or just against the purchase order, which rebates and credits are tracked to completion, how vendor lists changed after any acquisition, and what indirect spend actually totals once freight, MRO, contract labor and professional services are added up in one place.

None of these require a new system or a big audit. They require direct questions to procurement, in writing, in the first quarter, while you still have the standing to ask them without a mandate attached.

1. Who owns each vendor contract, and can you produce it today?

Ask procurement to produce the signed, current version of your ten largest service vendor contracts within a week. A weak answer is a scanned PDF from several renewals ago, an email chain instead of a document, or a shrug about who owns the file. If nobody can produce the current rate card for a vendor you pay every month, no one has been checking invoices against it, and that is the finding itself, not a preamble to one.

Contract ownership sounds like an administrative question. It is actually the first diagnostic. A company that can hand a new CFO the current, signed version of its largest service contracts within a week has an AP function that references those contracts routinely. A company that cannot has been paying invoices against whatever the last invoice said, not against what was negotiated.

Ask specifically for the rate card, any volume tier or rebate schedule, the surcharge table if one exists, and the not-to-exceed cap if the contract has one. Ask who last updated the file and when. A contract that has not been touched since signing, on a multi-year vendor relationship, is a contract nobody has been reconciling against.

This matters more after a merger or add-on acquisition, where vendor contracts from the acquired entity often sit in a different system, under a different owner, in a different format entirely.

2. Are invoices checked against the contract, or just against the PO?

Three-way matching checks the invoice against the purchase order and the receipt. It does not test whether a rate matches the rate card, whether a surcharge expired, or whether a volume tier should have triggered a rebate. Ask procurement and AP directly which of these two things happens today, because AP systems are built to do the first and their design assumes the second is covered elsewhere by a separate control.

The distinction between PO matching and contract matching is the single most useful question in this whole review. A PO confirms the vendor delivered what was ordered at the price on the order. It says nothing about whether that price still reflects the underlying contract, especially on multi-year agreements with built-in rate changes, tiered discounts, or time-limited surcharges.

Ask to see one recent invoice, side by side with its contract, walked through line by line in front of you. If the AP team has never done this exercise for a vendor, that is diagnostic information, not a criticism of the team: the tooling most companies run was built to catch PO mismatches, not contract drift.

This is also where you decide whether the gap is worth quantifying formally. See margin drift in industrial distribution for how this plays out by category if that is your sector.

3. How are rebates and credit memos tracked to completion?

Ask for the list of every rebate clause, volume discount, and credit memo issued in the last 12 months, and whether each one was actually applied to a later invoice or received as cash. A rebate clause in a contract is a promise, not a payment. If nobody can show you the reconciliation between promised rebates and received rebates, some portion of what you negotiated is sitting uncollected right now.

Rebate clauses and volume tiers are negotiated with real effort and then routinely set aside once the contract is signed. The clause lives in the contract file. The obligation to track whether volume crossed the tier threshold lives nowhere, unless someone built a process for it.

Ask procurement two separate questions: which contracts have a rebate or volume-tier clause, and who is responsible for confirming the tier was hit and the rebate was applied. If the answer to the second question is vague, that is where dollars go missing quietly, one contract at a time, never showing up as an error because nothing ever tests for it.

Credit memos deserve the same question. A vendor who issues a credit for a billing error has no obligation to also apply it. Someone on your side has to track it to the invoice where it lands.

4. What changed in the vendor list after your last acquisition or system migration?

If the company has done an acquisition, an ERP migration, or both, ask which vendor contracts were formally re-signed or consolidated afterward, and which are still running on the acquired entity's original terms. A vendor billing two entities under two different rate cards for the same service is a standing source of drift that predates you and will not fix itself without someone assigned to close it.

Post-acquisition vendor consolidation is a task that gets deprioritized against integration work that looks more urgent: systems, headcount, reporting lines. Vendor contracts sit quietly in the background, sometimes for years, running on whatever terms the acquired company negotiated before the deal closed.

Ask for a list of vendors that serve both the legacy business and any acquired entity, and whether each one bills under a single consolidated contract or under separate legacy terms. Two rate cards for the same freight lane, or two different labor bill rates for the same staffing vendor, is not unusual and is not evidence of anyone's failure. It is simply unfinished integration work.

See post-acquisition vendor contract consolidation for the mechanics of resolving this once you have found it.

5. What does indirect spend actually total, in one place?

Ask finance and procurement to produce one number: total spend across freight, MRO, contract labor, IT and professional services, and maintenance, for the trailing 12 months, from a single source. Each category tends to sit with a different owner and a different system, so a combined total is rarely sitting ready anywhere. The exercise of assembling it is itself informative about how fragmented vendor management is.

Indirect spend rarely has a single owner. Freight sits with logistics, contract labor with operations or HR, IT services with the technology team, MRO with plant maintenance. Each of these categories has its own approval chain and its own reporting, and none of them naturally rolls up into one line a CFO can see.

Asking for that single combined number in the first 100 days does two things. It tells you how much spend is actually in scope for contract compliance work, and it tells you, by how hard the exercise is, how much visibility currently exists.

Once you have the total, the next question is whether anyone is checking it against contract terms at all, category by category.

6. Should you commission a formal audit, or handle this internally first?

If the questions above produce clean, confident answers with documentation, the gap is likely small and internal follow-up is enough. If they produce silence, stale files, or answers that contradict each other across departments, that is the signal a fixed-scope diagnostic exists to resolve: a defined engagement that checks contract terms against actual invoices and delivers a prioritized roadmap in 2 to 4 weeks, across ValueXPA diagnostics.

The honest answer to whether you need outside help depends entirely on what the first five questions turned up. A company with current contracts on file, documented invoice-to-contract checks, and a working rebate tracker has already done the internal work this guide is asking for. Commissioning an audit there would mostly confirm what the team already knows.

A company where contracts are hard to locate, where invoice review stops at the purchase order, and where nobody can name who tracks rebates to completion has a gap that internal bandwidth in the first 100 days is unlikely to close on its own. That gap does not announce itself as an error. It looks like a normal invoice, paid on time, against a contract nobody re-checked.

A fixed-scope diagnostic exists for exactly that situation, because it is scoped to answer these five questions with evidence rather than assurance, without asking you to commit contingency fees or long-term software spend before you know the size of the problem.

For the wider pattern this sits inside, start with the margin drift guide.

For the wider pattern this sits inside, start with the margin drift guide.

7. Frequently Asked Questions (People Also Ask)

How long should this first-100-days review take?

The five questions can be asked and answered within the first quarter, since they require documents procurement should already have, not a new analysis. Expect the answers themselves, not the asking, to take the most time if contracts are scattered.

What if procurement pushes back on producing contracts quickly?

Frame it as onboarding, not audit. A new CFO reviewing the largest vendor relationships in the first 100 days is normal practice. If pushback continues past a reasonable request for documents, that resistance is itself worth noting.

Should I ask AP or procurement these questions?

Both, separately. Procurement usually owns the contract and the negotiated terms. AP usually owns the invoice matching process. Asking each side alone, before comparing answers, shows you where the handoff between them breaks down.

What counts as a red flag versus a normal gap?

A single stale contract or one unclear rebate is normal in any company. A pattern across most of your largest vendors, where nobody can produce current terms or show invoice-to-contract checks, is the signal that the gap is systemic rather than an isolated oversight.

Do I need new software before I can ask these questions?

No. All five questions can be answered with documents procurement and AP already hold: contracts, invoices, and whatever rebate tracking exists today, even if that tracking lives in a spreadsheet.

What if the answers vary a lot across business units?

That variation is itself information. It usually means vendor management has been handled locally rather than centrally, which is common after growth by acquisition and is worth naming explicitly rather than averaging away.

Is this different from a standard AP audit?

A standard AP audit typically looks backward for errors already made. These five questions are meant to establish, quickly, whether the underlying controls exist at all, which determines whether a deeper audit is the right next step.

What's the risk of waiting past 100 days to ask?

Once you have owned budget decisions for a vendor category, questions about that category's contracts read as reviewing your own work rather than inheriting someone else's. The early window is when the same questions carry no implication about your own performance.

Who should be in the room for these conversations?

The procurement lead who owns vendor relationships and the AP lead who processes the invoices, ideally in the same conversation so gaps between contract terms and invoice handling surface directly instead of getting lost between two separate reports.