Everything in One Place: What Does a Complete Procure-to-Pay Process Involve?

As businesses get more and more accustomed to using technology to manage workflows and make their processes more efficient, many e-procurement platforms are incorporating a complete automated procure-to-pay process into their systems. This allows companies to easily manage purchasing, approvals, compliance, suppliers and payments, and to maintain documentation that is easily accessible.

What is the Procure to Pay process?

Procure-to-pay (sometimes called P2P) is the process of integrating all the different stages of the procurement process in one place to generate greater efficiencies. It includes everything from the first steps of originating a demand, to floating a requisition, receiving and evaluating quotes, to the final steps involved in receiving and paying for goods and services.

Where does Proqura come in?

With Proqura, the procure-to-pay process covers initiating a purchase request for a product through requisitioning offers from suppliers to the point where payment for goods or services received it made. (It's important to note that the term payment does not always refer to the actual cash or electronic transaction of the payment, but rather to approval to the accounts payable team for releasing the payment to the supplier against an invoice.)

With Proqura, this covers the following steps:

1. Purchase request
2. Approval of purchase request
3. Requisition of bids from suppliers
4. Receipt of bids from suppliers
5. Evaluation of bids
6. Approval for selected bid
7. Placement of order
8. Receipt of delivery note from supplier
9. Receipt of goods or services from supplier
10. Inspection and acceptance of goods or services delivered
11. Receipt of invoice from supplier for goods or services delivered
12. Matching of invoice against the purchase order and the goods or services received
13. Confirmation to accounts payable to issue payment against invoice

A particularly useful feature of P2P solutions including Proqura is what is called three-way matching: an automated process carried out to verify that the goods received by the buyer are the same ones as those that were ordered and those that are billed. If the documents match, the transaction is ready to be sent to the accounts team for payment processing.

Takeaway

The goal of a procure-to-pay system is to allow companies to automate the procurement process from beginning to end. This level of automation can strengthen compliance, reduce errors, eliminate inefficiencies, and provide more control over suppliers and contracts. All without the headache of spreadsheets, manual paperwork and paper trails. Crucially, digitalizing your procurement process can not only improve procurement management, but can allow valuable insights to be made in terms of the data that is generated and maintained.