The management application your buying group has been waiting years for.

A buying group runs processes no off-the-shelf software models properly: the annual approval of its suppliers, the collection of member revenue declarations, the calculation of year-end rebates, and the contractual memory of all of it. None of that is accounting, CRM or order management. Which is why it almost always ends up in spreadsheets.

Why management software for a buying group cannot be bought off the shelf

The vendors addressing this market sell packaged products: a rebate module inside an ERP, a franchise extranet, a membership platform designed for associations. Each covers part of the need correctly and imposes its own way of working on the rest. In a buying group, that remainder is precisely what is specific: the structure of the negotiated scales, the split between the central body and its members, how a member who joined in March is treated at the annual close.

The outcome is always the same. The package goes in, it covers seventy per cent of the need, and the remaining thirty per cent goes back into Excel — now with an extra reconciliation step between the two. The group has added a tool without removing one.

What a buying group platform actually has to carry

The building blocks below make up the usual scope. No project delivers them all at once: they are sequenced, and the order depends far more on your annual calendar than on any technical logic.

Spreadsheet or platform: what actually changes

The comparison is not about speed. A well-built spreadsheet calculates quickly. What it does not do is remember — and in a buying group, memory is most of the work.

How a rebuild actually runs

A buying group cannot stop while it rebuilds. Approval agreements renew on fixed dates, declaration windows open on fixed dates, the statement falls once a year. Sequencing is therefore not a methodological preference: it is a constraint your calendar imposes.

1. 1

   Paid scoping, written scope

   Two workshops with your teams to model the rules as they are actually applied — exceptions included. The deliverable is a signed-off rules document and a fixed price, before a line of code.

2. 2

   First batch live in six to ten weeks

   We start with the process whose pain is measurable and whose risk is low: usually document management or the portal, sometimes the rebate engine when that is what is burning.

3. 3

   Later batches, timed to your calendar

   Approval workflows start one cycle before renewal. Declarations go live at the beginning of a window, never in the middle. Two-week sprints, a demo at the end of each, formal acceptance at every milestone.

4. 4

   Parallel campaign, then switch

   The first live campaign runs alongside your current method. You only switch once the two results reconcile — which is also where the rules nobody had written down surface.

For a group of fifty to eighty member companies, a full rebuild spans nine to fifteen months depending on how many annual cycles it has to cross. That is the same duration as a big-bang project, with value arriving from week eight instead of month eighteen, and risk spread across ten small go-lives instead of one large one.

What it costs, in orders of magnitude

We always start with scoping and a prototype at €6,000–10,000 excluding VAT depending on the scope, deducted in full from the project fee if it goes ahead. It is the only honest way to price: nobody can commit to a fixed price on a need that has not been written down yet.

Beyond that, a buying group platform is reasoned batch by batch, not as a blind headline fixed price. What moves the budget is almost never the size of the group: it is the number of unwritten rules to reconstruct, the state of the history to migrate, and the number of people who have to sign off a decision. A group with an available business owner empowered to decide costs structurally less than one where every arbitration waits for the next board meeting.

Why MEKANO rather than a generalist agency

MEKANO is a development studio based in Lyon, France, led by its founder, who personally runs every project. We have already delivered the complete platform of a Lyon-based buying group of more than 60 member companies: member and supplier portal, approval workflows, revenue declaration module, rebate calculation engine and document management with search across agreements.

• You will not have to explain what a year-end rebate, an approval amendment or a mid-year pro-rata is.
• No IT department required: we handle scoping, development, the acceptance environment, go-live and maintenance.
• Fixed price: scope and price are committed in the contract, and overruns are our problem.
• The source code and documentation are handed over. Reversibility is a clause, not a sales promise.
• The project team is named in the contract — you know who is doing the work.

What we do not do: sell a licence, impose a data model, or promise that an existing package will cover your rules. If a market product answers your need, we will say so during the discovery call — it has happened, and it costs us less than a badly started project.