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November 2013

HOW ABOUT THE VENDOR PAYING YOU FOR A CHANGE?

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How about the vendor paying YOU for a change?

It's one of the business office's primary roles; pay the vendor. It's a basic process that we all do. Wouldn't it be nice if we could find a way to reverse the roles and have the vendor pay us for a change? In one instance, Harford County Public Schools has figured out a way to do that. Two years ago we negotiated a new copier contract. Our process was to invite the business hungry copier suppliers to make us an offer based on existing contracts they held at the time. Basically, "Give us your best deal that we can piggyback". This created quite a bit of a competitive advantage for us for bargaining. During that negotiation we addressed copy allowances and overages. We inflated the copy allowance for the district and told them we would only pay for overages IF they paid us for "underages". We knew what our usage was and set an allowance high enough so that overages would not be a factor.

What we really wanted in the contract was for Harford County Public Schools to not have to pay for copies we didn't use. We wanted to get paid for the underages. Eventually, through negotiation, it worked. Initially the company only offered the underage payment as a credit. As part of the best and final offer we were able to get the underage as a refund payment. Last year Harford County Public Schools received a check from the vendor for $19,000. This month we received an underage refund check of $39,000. That's just about the salary for a starting teacher. Hopefully we've done our part to bring an additional teacher to the classroom for our district.

Jeff LaPorta

Supervisor of Purchasing

Harford County Public Schools