How do SMBs handle purchasing today?

For many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), purchasing is still a painful, manual process full of spreadsheets, back-and-forth emails with vendors, and hours spent chasing down POs. While this approach might work, it’s far from perfect.

A peak into how many SMBs purchase today, step by step:

1. Ordering (180 min):

• Check the inventory: Knowing how much stock you have isn’t always clear. Businesses often rely on multiple disconnected systems, or even manual counts by pen and paper to piece together an answer.

• Forecast demand: This is all about estimating future needs based on sales trends or gut feeling. Most of this is done by downloading previous demand data and trying to find a demand pattern that would work for the coming days and weeks.

• Calculate what to buy: When you understand what you have in inventory and what is the required for the next days of operation, you have to put those together to find what you need to buy. There is a lot of manual Excel work involved in this step, including top of mind adjustments for the order to be accepted by your supplier and optimizing your fulfilment method spend.

• Create a purchase order: Many businesses are drafting their POs in QuickBooks or generating them in Excel, then emailed manually to the vendor.

2. Waiting for your order (90 min):

• Order tracking and follow-up: Knowing whether your order is arriving in time and being able to work around unexpected events is fundamental to running your business, however, the process of getting to that information is not straightforward. Email chains, calls, and messages can take a lot of your time.

3. When order arrives (30 min):

• Receive & inspect: Staff check the goods and count items, often using pen and paper.

• Update inventory: Systems are updated manually (if at all).

• Payment: After checking the delivery, payments are typically made by wire transfer, often after more manual steps.

⚠️Although this approach can get the job done, it exacts a heavy toll on the business:

• Senior staff lose valuable time

• The process is highly manual and repetitive

• Buyers rarely optimize shipping or holding costs, leaving money on the table

• Weak data capture makes the operation hard to monitor and refine

• Critical know-how becomes concentrated in a single individual

🛠️ Where Nyck Comes In:

Nyck gives SMBs a single source of truth and makes the purchasing process seamless, from inventory planning to PO creation, and vendor communication. No more guesswork, no more chasing emails.

What used to take +5 hours now takes just 15 minutes:

1. Chat with Nyck to create orders based on current inventory and demand (5 min)

2. Review, adjust, and send vendor emails (10 min)

Faster decisions, fewer errors, all in one platform.

👉 Sign up to be a beta customer here