What is procure to pay or purchase to pay?

Purchase-to-pay (P2P) (also known as procure-to-pay) stands for the entire purchasing process of goods or services. From the beginning such as the order to the payment to the supplier. The entire procure-to-pay process consists of a huge number of separate processes that take place across multiple departments of an organization and therefore where multiple employees are involved. Doing this process manually and yourself can cause a lot of worry and confusion, but a modern purchase-to-pay approach will help you in more ways than you can imagine. On this page you can read everything you need to know about the procure to pay or purchase to pay process, the most common causes of disruptions and how you can prevent this with a purchase-to-pay solution. Finally, it tells you when you would benefit from automating the procure-to-pay process.

Jammers procure to pay process

There are certain events that can hinder a smooth purchase-to-pay process. We deal with the most common nuisances of the procure to pay process.

• Incorrect purchase order

An error on a purchase order, such as a zero too little or too much, can have unpleasant consequences for you and/or the customer. This can, for example, mean that employees of the customer do not have the right materials to be able to carry out the business processes according to the standard working method. This has major and annoying consequences for efficiency, which in turn means that the demand cannot be met within the agreed period.

• Incorrect invoice

An incorrect number or number of pieces on the invoice can have unpleasant consequences that can only be resolved after weeks or even months.

• Non-contract purchase

There may be a contract with a particular supplier for, say, office supplies. Imagine that employees still go to another store for these items. Maybe it’s not a lot of money, but still. The costs can ultimately be high due to the additional work.

Read more about indirect procurement as well.

Why automate the procure to pay or purchase to pay process?

For both small and large companies with many suppliers, a process can be very beneficial to automate the purchase-to-pay processes. If you have many suppliers, you naturally also have a lot of documents and data. This all needs to be processed.