ROLE OVERVIEW

The Professional Services Procurement Analyst runs the purchase-order path for services rather than goods: consulting, contingent labour, integration work, maintenance and support engagements. The role receives the request, validates that the money and the supplier are in order before anything is committed, raises the requisition, drives it through approval, and keeps the resulting order and its accruals accurate until the work is invoiced and closed.

In this role, you will lead the purchase-order lifecycle for professional services, including consulting, contingent labor, and project-based engagements. Unlike hardware procurement, which relies on physical goods receipts, services purchasing requires precision in managing milestones, rate cards, and time-based billing. Because service costs are recognized through general ledger and cost-centre allocations, your meticulous attention to coding, budget, and commercial terms serves as the primary financial control, ensuring accuracy before costs are finalized at month-end.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1.  Request Intake & Validation

• Collect professional services purchase-order requests, review each for completeness, and follow up with the requester where information is missing rather than raising an incomplete requisition.
• Validate budget availability, supplier eligibility and compliance status before any commitment is created.
• Confirm general ledger account, cost centre and spend category coding are correct for services spend, since this determines how the cost is recognised.
• Check that the commercial basis is clear — fixed price, milestone, rate card or time and materials — and that the supporting statement of work or quote supports the value requested.
• Identify requests that are not in fact services purchasing and route them to the correct path.

2.  Requisition Creation & Approval Tracking

• Create the purchase requisition in the procurement system with complete, accurate detail and correct supplier and coding references.
• Submit and monitor approvals, following up with approvers and escalating where an approval stalls rather than letting it age silently.
• Manage edits and modifications — review approver comments, amend the requisition and reprocess the change.
• Confirm submission back to the requester, update the tracker and log the transaction data.
• Keep the requester informed at each stage, since services requests usually have a start date someone is planning around.

3.  Purchase Order Processing & Financial Alignment

• Save and circulate the purchase order once the requisition is approved and the order generated, and update the tracker and records.
• Maintain accruals so that committed but uninvoiced services spend stays current, working to the finance calendar.
• Support downstream invoice matching and resolve queries where an invoice does not reconcile to the order or the agreed commercial basis.
• Investigate orders that are out of funds and raise the uplift or amendment needed before delivery is interrupted.
• Archive purchase orders and maintain a complete, retrievable record set for audit.

4.  Tracking, Reporting & Continuous Improvement

• Monitor acknowledgment and completion timing against the agreed service levels and act before a target is missed.
• Report cycle time and error rates, and work the trends rather than the individual exceptions.
• Maintain quality and error reporting, feeding recurring causes back into the procedure.
• Keep procedures and templates current as the service scales and as systems change.
• Identify repeatable steps suitable for automation and support their implementation.
  

PERFORMANCE & SERVICE LEVELS

Indicative performance targets for the role; final service levels are confirmed on engagement and measured per service line.

• Requisition Accuracy: sustain ≥99% accuracy on coding, supplier, value and commercial basis before a requisition is routed for approval.
• Turnaround: acknowledge and process requests within the agreed windows, with urgent requests prioritised.
• Approval Progression: no approval left ageing without follow-up or escalation.
• Accrual Currency: accruals complete and accurate for 100% of open services orders each finance period.
• Funds Continuity: zero service interruptions caused by an order running out of funds without warning.
• Documentation: 100% of orders archived with a complete, retrievable record.
• First Meaningful Response: provide a meaningful technical update on 90% of requests within 2 business hours.
• Ticket Quality: sustain ≥95% against the weighted quality scorecard, which is weighted toward technical accuracy, then completeness, timeliness and communication.
• Customer Satisfaction: sustain ≥95% of responses rated Excellent or Good.

TOOLS & SYSTEMS

• Procurement platform: requisition creation, approval workflow and purchase order generation for services categories.
• ERP and finance systems: SAP for orders, spend records and accrual maintenance.
• Ticketing and intake: enterprise ticketing for request lifecycle, tracking and audit trail.
• Reporting: spreadsheet and BI tooling for cycle-time, error and accrual reporting.
  

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

Mandatory

• 2–5+ years in indirect or services procurement, procure-to-pay, or purchase-order operations in a shared-services environment.
• Hands-on requisition and purchase-order creation in a procurement platform and ERP.
• Understanding of how services purchasing differs from goods — statement-of-work basis, milestone and rate-card billing, and the absence of a goods receipt to match against.
• Accurate general ledger, cost-centre and category coding, with the judgement to question coding that looks wrong.
• Exposure to accruals and the month-end cycle, and comfort working to a finance calendar.
• Clear English communication with requesters, approvers, suppliers and finance.
• Willing and able to work a shift-based roster, including night shifts, from the Hyderabad delivery centre.

Preferred

• SAP Materials Management or Procure-to-Pay experience.
• Experience in a services category such as consulting, contingent labour, facilities or marketing.
• Two-way and three-way matching exposure and invoice exception handling.
• Contract or statement-of-work review exposure.
• Spreadsheet automation or scripting applied to tracker and reporting work.