Three quotes, twenty emails, one Excel sheet: the risks of small-value procurement in higher education

In brief: Below-threshold procurements are frequent and easy to treat as routine, but they carry a hidden risk: lack of auditability. Since 2021 no law mandates three quotes; the obligation now comes from institutions' own internal policies under the Ávr., making it just as binding and just as open to audit scrutiny. The typical email-and-Excel workflow scatters the decision across inboxes, so even sound choices can't be proven afterward — Fluenta One's Smart RFx, blind evaluation, and immutable audit trail turn small purchases into structured, fully traceable, faster processes.

When it comes to procurement in higher education, the conversation is almost always about public tenders — the large, regulated, many-party procedures. But day-to-day operations are made up of the many small, below-threshold purchases: a software license, a service, a few pieces of equipment. Precisely because they are small and frequent, it's easy to treat them as routine.

Yet these carry one of the most insidious risks of all: the lack of auditability.

What the law no longer requires, but the internal rules do

It's worth clearing up a common misconception. For below-threshold procurements, since 2021 there has been no law that mandates obtaining three quotes. Today the obligation comes from elsewhere: under the public finance implementing decree (Ávr.), the head of the budgetary institution sets out the procurement procedure in an internal policy — and in practice, most institutions specify precisely the requirement to obtain three quotes in that policy, in order to ensure competition and transparency.

The rule, then, is not an external constraint but the institution's own, voluntarily adopted discipline. That, however, makes it just as binding, and it can just as easily become the subject of scrutiny during an audit.

The routine that breeds risk

It's worth following how such a purchase unfolds at most institutions. The requesting colleague emails three suppliers for quotes. The offers come back separately, in different formats and at different times. Someone copies them into an Excel sheet, compares them, and circulates it by email to the decision-makers, who also respond by email. The selection of the winning offer ends up documented across a dozen messages scattered through several people's inboxes — if it is documented at all.

This process is vulnerable at several points at once. Requesting and evaluating the quotes is slow and manual. The approval chain is opaque: after the fact, it's hard to reconstruct who decided what, when, and on what basis. The chance of human error is high — a mistyped figure, a missed offer, a file saved to the wrong folder. All of this undermines exactly what matters most at an institution spending public money: traceability.

When the audit comes

The operations of higher education institutions are framed by ever-stronger integrity and oversight expectations. During an audit, it is not enough that the decision was a good one — you also have to be able to prove that it was made properly, impartially, and with documentation. Piecing that together after the fact from a scattered email chain is exhausting, sometimes impossible. Missing or unreconstructable documentation can in itself lead to a negative finding, regardless of whether the procurement was substantively sound.

The risk, then, is not that the institution decides badly, but that it cannot even prove its good decisions.

What Fluenta One does differently

Fluenta One turns small-value procurements into the same kind of structured, fully traceable process as the large ones — without making them cumbersome. The platform's Smart RFx feature enables template-based requests for quotes: suppliers submit their offers in a uniform format through a dedicated supplier portal, so there's no more hand-assembled Excel sheet.

The comparison is automated and follows a customizable set of criteria. The system also supports blind evaluation, which removes subjectivity and any suspicion of conflict of interest from the decision: evaluators assess the offers without knowing the supplier's identity.

Most important of all, however, is the audit trail. Every step — the request for quotes, the offers received, the approvers' comments, the justification for the decision — is recorded automatically and immutably, tied to a single process. Communication no longer scatters across emails either: questions, requests for missing information, and attachments are all linked to the specific procurement. During an audit, there's no need to reassemble the decision after the fact from inboxes, because the entire decision chain can be reconstructed in one place, in full, even years later.

Small purchases are a strategic matter too

It's easy to think that auditability only matters for the large, high-risk purchases. In reality, though, it's the sheer volume of small-value procurements that makes up daily operations — and it's precisely these that remain the least documented. At a publicly funded institution, where the spending of every forint is accountable, the transparency of small purchases is not a matter of detail but a daily test of institutional integrity.

At the same time, this is the area where the situation can be improved fastest with the least effort, and where order doesn't slow down day-to-day work but speeds it up.

If you'd like to learn more about how Fluenta One supports procurement at higher education institutions, explore our higher education solutions. And if you'd like to make your small-value procurements auditable and faster, book an informal conversation with one of our experts.

Sources:

No law requiring three mandatory quotes — the internal-policy obligation under the Ávr. (Költségvetési Levelek)