Purchase Submission Request
Effective Date: January 1, 2021 (proposed)
As the Company grows there are legal matters, costs, and overall visibility into what staff members are signing up for and the reason. This process is to empower you to get back to doing what you do best at Mattermost. This process is to foster awareness and highlight the key steps to moving vendor contracts through the review cycle with minimal disruption to your day to day. To do this, we need your help to address the items and systems we purchase on behalf of the company. Our goal of defining the purchasing process is to guide decision support by reducing the time to execute a contract, while maintaining equitable terms and conditions (T&Cs) that derisk Mattermost.
All Mattermost staff members, including our CEO, who are spending money or signing Mattermost up to T&Cs should follow this process.
Step 1: Log into Accrualify and submit a PO in the PO Module. This will kick-off the order requisition process and a Purchase Order Number (PO-#) will be assigned.
Step 4: Send document to be signed internally.
Step 5: Obtain a counter-signed document.
Step 6: Send the final counter-signed agreement to the Procurement Team.
Step 7: Follow the vendor on-boarding process.
The first step to get a contract or vendor approved, is to submit a PO in Accrualify. When assessing if the form should be completed, please ask yourself the following questions:
Am I trying to purchase a new product or service on behalf of Mattermost?
Is this a purchase not covered in How to spend company money?
Is this in my budget for the fiscal year?
Is the purchase not within my budget this fiscal year?
Is there an agreement that needs to be signed?
Are there legal T&Cs in the agreement that will bind Mattermost if signed?
If you answer YES to one or more of the questions above, you should submit a PO in Accrualify. This way Mattermost is able to track when spending will occur; what legal T&Cs we are binding the company to; manage cash flows; track to fiscal year plan; denote deviations; and ensure correct record keeping for our financial statements and legal contracts. When completing the form, please be sure that:
You own the vendor relationship.
You have the approvals from your Manager to move forward on the spend request.
There are several T&Cs used in the form that may require clarification. We have defined these below:
Budget Spending: The purchase is going against an approved budget number signed off by The Board of Directors.
Non-Budget Spending: The purchase is additional spend or moving approved spend from one bucket to another.
Functional Approver: The person who has the authority to approve Budget and Non-Budget spending and outlined in the Authorization Matrix.
Once a PO is submitted, the request is routed to the Procurement Team to process, review and obtain the spending approval. If you receive approval, you will be provided a MM-# to be used at a future date.
If you did not provide a contract in the PO submission and have received spend approval, ask your vendor contact to send you a Word Document of their contract so that Legal may review and if necessary, REDLINE the agreement. You may reference the legal review process outlined in the Authorization Matrix.
All contracts are to address either Ian Tien (CEO) or Tim Quock (VP Finance), and should include the following relevant information:
Type | Information |
Contract Signer | See Authorization Matrix |
Address | 530 Lytton Avenue, Second floor Palo Alto, CA, 94301, USA |
Office Phone Number* | (650) 667-8512 |
Ian Tien or Aneal Vallurupalli’s personal phone number should not be used.
Is your contract an MTA?
A signed MTA can usually be provisioned within 24 hours from request. Using non-standard or vendor-papered T&Cs will exponentially increase review. On average it takes 2-3 weeks.
If the agreement is an addendum to the original contract that has already been approved and the addendum does not change pricing, then spend approval is not required again. Instead, please attach the addendum to your PO submission, so that it can be reviewed by Legal. There is no need to follow Step 2 onward.
If the original contract has already been approved by Legal and you are submitting a new order form that only impacts pricing, create a new issue by submitting another PO in Accrualify. Additional legal review will not be required.
Step 3: Legal review and approval
Legal review is required for most contracts unless the contract adopts Mattermost’s Standard T&Cs or MTA.
[PLACEHOLDER - Link to standard T&Cs]
If the contract cannot be approved, Legal will provide REDLINES, and Procurement Team will negotiate directly with the Vendor.
Please note that the Procurement Team processes the contracts in the order they are received. Our SLA timeline is one to two weeks, so please plan accordingly when submitting a PO.
Once the contract is approved, the Procurement Team will prepare the contract for signing.
Create a PDF of the fully approved contract.
Director or above will initial in DocuSign.
Contract sent to VP Finance or CEO for final signature in DocuSign.
Please note that contracts that don’t go through our internal signing process will take much longer to procure and sign.
Once a contract is signed by Mattermost, a PDF version will be sent to the vendor for counter-signature by the Procurement Team and the Requester will be CC’d on the email for visibility.
Send the final counter-signed contract to the Procurement Team to file away.
For all vendor on-boarding questions, refer to the How to on-board a vendor and How to get paid. Please be sure to communicate to your vendor that all invoices should include the MM-# for reference.