Note: This is a guest post written by Marco
Businesses use the term procure-to-pay (P2P) to explain the whole set of processes from sourcing, negotiating, requesting, and ordering a sale because the customer through procurement to receiving goods or services, to processing and paying approved vendor invoices by performing accounts payable and accounting functions.
What is Procure-to-pay?
Procure-to-pay is a commercial enterprise procedure cycle spanning from procurement features for items and offerings needed, to receiving procedures, consisting of verification, to debts payable and accounting features. Payables obligations encompass dealer bill matching to buy orders and receiving reports, getting bill approvals, paying accepted invoices, recording transactions, and producing reports. This procure-to-pay definition highlights that P2P consists of many procure-to-pay procedure steps.
Procure-to-pay works by standardizing and streamlining procurement, receiving, and accounts payable workflows and documents throughout the procure-to-payment process. Forms utilized in the P2P process include purchase requisitions, purchase orders, receiving reports, and vendor invoices.
Procure-to-pay software works best when processes are automated with an E-procurement system combined with AP automation software integrated with ERP or accounting software. These P2P software systems replace paper documents and manual data entry to form procurement, purchasing, payables, payments, and accounting processes far more efficient.
What is the Procure-to-pay Process?
You can expect your P2P or procure-to-pay process to look like this:
Supply Management: Supply management refers to your practices and habits around keeping in touch together with your suppliers and managing your supplier relationships as a customer. Supply chain management is significant for keeping your supply chain running smoothly and ensuring that your day-to-day operations run smoothly. Nothing can pack up a company’s ability to work more quickly than a supply issue.
Vendor Selection: Vendor choice refers to all of the comparative studies that is going into efficaciously selecting the proper providers. The high-quality providers might be long-time period partners, so that is a important aspect of the purchase-to-pay cycle. Manual seller choice regularly takes tremendous quantities of enterprise time and sources to carry out efficaciously.
Requisition: Requisitioning refers back to the manner of having inner approval from branch heads or organization leaders to reserve the important uncooked items or services. In many companies, that is one of the maximum convoluted steps with inside the guide P2P cycle, with signatures getting lost, branch heads now no longer being to be had while needed, and plenty of different guide issues.
Invoice reconciliation: Invoice reconciliation is that the act of comparing the invoice to the acquisition order to make sure that everything matches up and your vendor has charged you appropriately.
Accounts Payable: This is the last step within the cycle and refers to handling the acquisition order for payment, ensuring the payment gets sent out on time, and logging the payment into your accounting and payable systems.
What is E-Procurement?
E-procurement is that the use of a digital network or software platform to acquire goods and services through a web supplier portal, the web, or your company’s Intranet. E-procurement platforms solve problems inherent within the procure-to-pay (P2P) process.
Some specialized E-procurement platforms let employees make repetitive purchases of lower-cost items like office supplies from a pre-approved network of suppliers employing a P-card. The result’s better tracking of purchases for tail spend management and lower purchasing costs.
Whether or not you’re currently taking advantage of a streamlined procurement process, you’ll benefit massively from an e-procurement software that leverages AI and real-time analytics. An e-procurement solution helps confirm that your procurement department runs smoothly, effectively, and during a way that cuts department costs, improves income, and contributes to company-wide profitability.
The odds are high that your purchasing director is currently battling a plethora of challenges to beat. Whether it’s cutting costs, improving your P2P solution effectiveness, ensuring everything’s aboveboard in tax season, or any of the opposite countless tasks involved in P2P, an e-procurement solution can assist you improve your business department drastically. Other key benefits that companies report from using e-procurement solutions are increased spend visibility and heightened security and control.
