Requisitions
A request with a requester, a need-by date, and a coding proposal, routed for approval before a commitment exists rather than after somebody has already ordered.
Platform · operations
A spend report built from posted invoices is always behind, because the largest costs — subcontracts and material orders — are committed long before anyone bills you. Purchasing exists so that commitment is a number in your job cost and cash forecast rather than a fact somebody remembers.
What it does
A request with a requester, a need-by date, and a coding proposal, routed for approval before a commitment exists rather than after somebody has already ordered.
Correct vendor, contracted pricing pulled from the agreement, right GL coding and dimensions, and delivery terms that actually apply to that supplier.
Full, partial, and over-receipt handled distinctly, with quantity variances recorded against the line rather than absorbed into the total.
PO to receipt to invoice, with configurable tolerance. Variances are itemised to the line that caused them instead of blocking the whole document.
Open POs and subcontract balances appear in job cost and cash forecasting, which is what turns cost-to-complete from an estimate into a calculation.
Buying at list when you hold a negotiated rate, or from a new vendor when an approved one supplies the same thing. This is where most recoverable savings sit.
Most companies below $100M run purchasing informally — an email, a verbal approval, a PO raised afterwards to satisfy the finance team. It works, in the sense that things get bought, and it means nobody knows what has been committed until the invoices arrive.
The consequence is not overspending in the abstract. It is that project cost-to-complete is a project manager’s estimate wearing the authority of an accounting number, and that cash forecasting misses outflows already promised. Both are decisions being made on incomplete information for a reason that is entirely fixable.
Procurement software is usually sold on negotiating leverage, which matters above the mid-market. Between $10M and $150M the recoverable money is almost entirely in three unglamorous places: buying off-contract when a negotiated rate exists, paying prices that drifted above an agreed schedule, and duplicate vendors supplying the same thing at different rates.
None of those require negotiating harder. They require noticing, consistently, across thousands of transactions — which is the shape of work a person does badly and software does well. In our engagements this is reliably the fastest measurable return in purchasing.
The distinction between a requisition and a purchase order matters more than it sounds. A requisition is a request that has not yet created an obligation; a PO is a contractual commitment. Approving after the PO exists is approving something already done.
Getting the sequence right is mostly a process change rather than a software one, and it is the change that most reduces surprise spend. We will push for it and it is your decision whether the organisation will tolerate it.
Limits
RFQs, supplier scorecards at scale, and category management are a specialist discipline. We handle transactional procurement and the analysis that surfaces leakage.
Receiving against a PO is not bin-level control, wave picking, or cycle counting. If you need those, that points to Acumatica or NetSuite.
If purchasing is done by text message and the PO is raised afterwards, software records that faithfully. The sequence change has to be a management decision first.
Questions
A year of AP detail is enough to surface duplicate vendors, off-contract buying, and pricing that drifted.