Ageing Purchase Requests: Find the Bottlenecks in Your Procurement Process
Purchase requests sit blocked in approval queues without the procurement team knowing. Claude maps every pending request by department and approver in a single question.
The Problem
Purchase requests are the entry point of the procurement process. They allow teams to formalise their needs before a purchase order is raised. But in practice, they frequently sit blocked in approval queues for days or even weeks — without the procurement team or the requester knowing exactly where the hold-up is.
The problem stems from a lack of centralised visibility. Each approver sees their own queue, but nobody has a cross-functional view: how many requests have been pending for more than a week? Who is the bottleneck? Which departments are accumulating unprocessed requests? Answering these questions today requires exporting data, joining multiple tables, and manually building a consolidated view.
In the meantime, operational teams escalate by email or Slack, generating noise and straining the relationship between procurement and business units. Urgent requests are not visually prioritised. And when a €50,000 request has been sitting in an absent manager's queue for three weeks, nobody knows.
What the Spendesk MCP Changes with Claude
With the Spendesk MCP, Claude accesses all pending purchase requests, sorts them by age, and cross-references them with user data to identify bottlenecks — in a single question.
I identified 14 purchase requests pending for more than 7 days:
| Request | Requester | Department | Amount | Pending Since | Awaiting Approver |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REQ-2026-0891 | Lucas Bernard | IT | €48,000 | 22 days | Thomas Renard (CFO) |
| REQ-2026-0834 | Camille Vidal | Marketing | €12,400 | 19 days | Marie Dupont (CMO) |
| REQ-2026-0867 | Florent Masse | Engineering | €8,900 | 17 days | Thomas Renard (CFO) |
| REQ-2026-0902 | Sandra Klein | HR | €6,200 | 16 days | Paul Girard (CPO) |
| REQ-2026-0915 | Marc Jouve | Sales | €5,800 | 14 days | Marie Dupont (CMO) |
| REQ-2026-0923 | Inès Moreau | Finance | €4,400 | 13 days | Thomas Renard (CFO) |
| REQ-2026-0941 | Romain Faure | Product | €3,100 | 12 days | Paul Girard (CPO) |
| REQ-2026-0958 | Léa Dumont | CS | €2,800 | 11 days | Sophie Blanc (VP CS) |
| … | … | … | … | … | … |
Would you like me to prepare a summary of follow-up messages to send to each approver, sorted by urgency?
Going Further: 2 Additional Use Cases
Approver With the Most Unprocessed Requests
Identifying which approver holds the most pending requests helps determine whether a bottleneck is structural (scope too wide) or circumstantial (absence, busy period).
Approver ranking by number of pending requests:
| Approver | Role | Pending Requests | Total Amount | Average Wait Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas Renard | CFO | 6 requests | €74,100 | 15.3 days |
| Marie Dupont | CMO | 4 requests | €21,800 | 12.1 days |
| Paul Girard | CPO | 3 requests | €14,200 | 9.4 days |
| Sophie Blanc | VP CS | 2 requests | €5,600 | 8.2 days |
| Others (5 approvers) | — | 4 requests | €6,100 | 7.1 days |
Would you like me to identify the purchase types that systematically require CFO approval, to evaluate where delegation is possible?
Requests Over €10,000 Blocked for More Than 14 Days
Large blocked requests represent both an operational risk (project delays) and a financial risk (unformalised commitments that may lead to off-process purchases).
I identified 4 purchase requests above €10,000 pending for more than 14 days:
| Request | Description | Amount | Department | Pending Since | Approver |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REQ-2026-0891 | IBM Maximo licences | €48,000 | IT | 22 days | Thomas Renard |
| REQ-2026-0834 | Q3 display campaign | €12,400 | Marketing | 19 days | Marie Dupont |
| REQ-2026-0867 | Kubernetes infrastructure | €8,900 | Engineering | 17 days | Thomas Renard |
| REQ-2026-0902 | Leadership training 2026 | €6,200 | HR | 16 days | Paul Girard |
Would you like me to generate an escalation email for each of these approvers with the full request detail?
Key Takeaways
- Purchase requests pending more than 7 days signal a procurement process failure —
get_requests+get_userssurface them in a single question. - A single approver can hold a disproportionate share of pending requests — visibility on this bottleneck enables action (delegation, reminder, prioritisation).
- Requests over €10,000 blocked for more than 14 days create bypass risk (off-process purchases) and project delivery risk.
- Average processing time is an essential procurement KPI — the target is generally under 5 business days.
- Running this analysis every Monday morning allows blockers to be resolved before they become operational crises.
Related skills
Identify open purchase orders with no recent invoice activity, expired POs, and the budget commitment they are blocking.
Analyze pending purchase requests by age, identify approval bottlenecks, and measure average approval turnaround times.