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Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
Finance management
The main reason for investing in a TMS is to reduce costs that your organization spends on translation in general. See how can this tool help you achieve it.
Purchase orders
A Purchase Order is the specification of costs that your vendors (e.g. translators, LSPs) will charge you.

Key TMS features
Every TMS should have certain features you should look for to meet your business needs.
- Project management
  Even though the primary goal of a TMS is to automate a lot of tasks in the translation process, it still requires people to manage it.
- Finance management
  The main reason for investing in a TMS is to reduce costs that your organization spends on translation in general. See how can this tool help you achieve it.
  - Rate cards
    Rate cards make it easy to estimate costs, calculate a project's budget or choose the most cost-effective language vendor.
  - Purchase orders
    A Purchase Order is the specification of costs that your vendors (e.g. translators, LSPs) will charge you.
- Content management
  A TMS maintains all the translation-related content centrally to be accessed in real time.
- Translation editor (Workbench)
  Currently, hardly anyone translates in an original document, be it Word, HTML file or InDesign. Most translators and reviewers work in special text editors that are core CAT tool components.
- Quality management
  There are still discussions on what should be considered a high-quality translation. Is it an error-free document in the target language or the smooth process where every step complies with the established procedure?
- Machine translation
  Machine translation engines are third-party systems for automatic translation that are not standard components of a TMS.
- Connectors
  Learn how to gain more control over your content by integrating content management systems and translation management systems via a connector.
- Security
  Nowadays, data security is on top of mind of all businesses, with the translation industry being no exception.
- Documentation
  When you start working with a new tool, it is extremely useful to have relevant documentation at hand to refer to it when you need it.
- Support
  High-quality documentation is useful, but in some cases it may not be enough. As with every IT tool, with TMSs you can also experience technical problems.
- Product development
  You have bought a TMS and what comes next? Since every IT tool is upgraded from time to time and you get the new version instantly if you use the cloud-based software, you need to be ready for constant changes.

Purchase orders

A Purchase Order is the specification of costs that your vendors (e.g. translators, LSPs) will charge you.

You can generate it easily before your vendors start working on the project. Based on the data entered in rate cards, you can generate a Purchase Order (PO) easily for every translation project created in XTM and assigned to a linguist or an LSP.

You only need to go to Project Editor > Estimates and click on Generate.

How to generate Purchase Order in XTM — Figure 1. How to generate PO in XTM

You can generate costs based on: metrics, current metrics, statistics source or statistics target. In Data > Estimates > PO settings you can choose e.g. a calculation method (subtraction/addition) and other features that should be included in the file and work best for you.

A Purchase Order is a .pdf or .xls file showing all the metrics and the final price you will pay for this translation. You can also generate a Custom PO if needed, where the costs can be broken down into particular language pairs and workflow steps.

Sample Purchase Order from XTM — Figure 2. Sample Purchase Order from XTM

You can send this file to your vendor by email or request that XTM does it for you directly using feature Email PO to Linguist.

XTM also gives you an opportunity to enter your own cost settings, exchange rates and proposal factors to make finance management for translation projects easy.

Note: If you work for an LSP, you could benefit from the fact that the Estimates tab where all costs are generated, is divided into 2 sections: Proposal and Costs. Depending on your XTM configuration, one of them can be used to show how much you will charge your customer. As a result, you can generate two POs: one for your vendor and one for your customer.