Best Procurement Software Vendors for Businesses for 2023

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e-Procurement Software Vendors for All Business Types and Sizes

Procurement plays a vital role in almost every organization as it deals with the process of purchasing goods and services needed for day-to-day business operations. It involves various activities such as need identification, requisition creation, supplier selection, price and payment terms negotiation, contract creation, and inventory management. Monitoring and managing these tasks and keeping track of thousands of receipts is challenging with traditional processes.

However, procurement software or electronic purchasing software provides businesses with the right tools and insights to track, analyze, and manage their spending. It helps automate purchasing functions, maintain goods inventory, control spending, and ensure smooth purchasing operations.

Whether it is a standalone application or an add-on tool for the existing system, procurement solutions assist businesses in managing purchasing activities such as creation and approval of requisitions and POs, supplier sourcing and onboarding, product negotiation and ordering, matching invoices, and bill payments. It centralizes procurement-related information on a secure cloud-based platform and allows authorized people to access the data whenever required from anywhere, anytime.

A few advanced procurement solutions also allow you to configure automated workflows to streamline the purchasing process while ensuring that nothing can be purchased without prior approvals. They enable enterprises to organize e-auctions that allow different vendors to bid for the requisitions and help procurement teams negotiate the best price, timelines, and payment terms, and source the right vendors for the requisition.

Does My Company Need Procurement Software?

Investing in a procurement solution is a big decision for every enterprise as it involves time, money, and resources. Even in today’s technologically advanced world, many startups and SMEs are still relying on traditional, spreadsheet-based processes, believing them to be cost-effective. This assumption goes wrong when considering the time and resources that get wasted with manual processes.

Effective procurement processes can help businesses save money, time, and other resources. However, it is impossible to achieve efficiency with the outdated approach to managing the procure-to-pay cycle. Fortunately, an advanced procurement solution provides businesses with various benefits that enhance productivity and profitability.

Improves Efficiency: Automation eliminates manual tasks involved in the procurement process and speeds up the entire procure-to-pay process. Purchasing process which usually takes days can now be condensed to just a few hours, thereby improving efficiency.
Eliminate Manual Processes: Manual processes are prone to errors and are time-consuming. With the procurement solution, businesses can manage the entire procure-to-pay process electronically – from the requisition and PO creation with templates to approval, auctions, contracts, negotiations, and more.
Cost Savings: Manual processes require more resources and involve paper printing and maintenance costs. Plus, the costs associated with duplicate payments and penalties for late payments add up to a large amount of money in the long run. Automation in procurement processes reduces the time and resources required to manage the tasks involved in the purchasing process and helps save costs.
Boosts Productivity: As most of the tedious procurement activities are automated and require little to no human intervention, you can relieve your procurement teams and let them focus on productive tasks that add value to the organization.
Ensures Compliance: Customized approval workflows make it easier for you to configure rule-based hierarchies and ensure that every purchase made across the organization complies with the company’s policies.
Actionable Data: Gain real-time, accurate insights into spend data, create financial reports, and identify potential issues in the supply chain. This data allows you to analyze existing processes and helps make the right decisions to overcome issues and improve the process.

What to Look for While Choosing Business Procurement Software

Procurement technology is meant to reduce human effort, shorten cycle time, and at the same time, improve the accuracy and effectiveness of procurement teams. The technology should be responsive and flexible enough to accommodate user needs, leading to a higher user adoption rate. It should also be compatible with other source systems that the organization may be using and have a fast but well-planned schedule.

Mobile Accessibility: In today’s mobile-first world, remote procurement that allows employees to request, approve, and make purchases on the go is imperative. The solution should provide advanced features such as push notifications to speed up the process, snap and save options to capture and store receipts, one-tap approvals to approve requisitions, and more.
Ease of Use: Implementing advanced software doesn’t ensure the expected outcome until your employees know how to use it. Always go for a procurement solution that is easy to use and manage. It would be even better if you signed up for a free trial offered by the vendor and ensured that the solution perfectly suits your company’s procurement workflow.
Integration with Accounting Systems: A good purchasing solution provides you the flexibility to integrate with your existing accounting, AP, and other ERP systems and ensures easy data transfer and management.
Quick Implementation & Onboarding: No one wants to have downtime while onboarding new software. So, look for a solution that ensures quick setup, data transfer, and training time and lets you start using the features immediately.
Customer Support: Often you may need some support from technical experts to resolve any issues and use software to the fullest. Make sure that the vendor is available whenever you need any sort of support.
Supports Procure-to-pay Cycle: Procurement solutions should provide employees with the right set of tools that they need to manage the entire procure-to-pay cycle, from requisition to approval and payment to the vendors.
Spend Insights and Reporting: Procurement teams should be able to generate accurate reports to analyze spending, employees’ performance, and productivity. These insights allow businesses to identify which employee is spending more and thereby help you implement the right strategies to improve processes.
Vendor Management Capabilities: Good supplier relationships mean better prices, discounts, and quality products and services. Invest in a procurement solution that provides a dedicated vendor portal to manage vendors effectively.

Key Procurement Software Vendors:

1. SutiSoft – Procurement Software

Founded: 2009

Prime Location: USA, India

Pricing: $4/requisition/month

About SutiProcure:

SutiProcure is a next-generation online procurement software application that lets you manage your spend effectively from anywhere with ease. The software provides robust features such as purchase requisitions, catalog, purchase orders, invoice management, budget tracking, vendor management, contracts, and more, and helps you automate and streamline the entire procure-to-pay process.

Key Features

Catalog Management: Catalog provides employees with an e-commerce shopping experience by allowing them to make purchases from preferred vendors with ease. The punch-out catalog provides employees with a consolidated view of items (global or buyer-specific products listed by vendors) from preferred vendors and makes the purchasing process much simpler.
Sourcing: Send RFQs to suppliers, evaluate their responses, and award contracts to the right suppliers who offer products or services at the best prices.
Vendor Management: Measure suppliers’ performance by a variety of factors such as quality, delivery timelines, payment terms, and more. This allows you to evaluate the risk associated with suppliers and helps you set compliance requirements to drive more value across the supply chain.
Purchase Orders: With SutiProcure, you can create POs on negotiated terms and send them to vendors easily from a single interface. Automating PO approval workflow gives greater visibility and control and helps increase the overall productivity of the purchasing process.
Flexible Approval Workflows: SutiProcure provides you the flexibility to configure automated approval workflows by role, requisition priority, amount, and other criteria to speed up the purchasing process. For instance, you can create an automated workflow for purchase order requests within a certain budget or from a specific employee or department.
Audit Trails: SutiProcure automatically tracks and maintains the full audit trail report for each order from requisition to final payment. Authorized employees can access these reports to measure progress toward goals and eliminate inefficiencies in the process.
Budget Control: With SutiProcure, you can create budgets for procurement processes and get complete insights into spending. Real-time analytics data helps track the company’s financial performance and make informed decisions.
Contracts: SutiContract integration provides a range of advanced features such as contract authoring templates, version control, automated approval routing, and eSignature integration, thereby helping you create, manage, and monitor contracts effectively.
Reports and Analytics: SutiProcure provides you with the flexibility to generate reports with custom parameters and extract actionable insights from procurement data. This data helps you identify bottlenecks and improve the productivity and efficiency of the procurement process.
Create Direct PO: SutiProcure also provides you with the flexibility to create purchase orders directly without going through the requisition phase.

What Customers Say About SutiProcure

“Cost-effective and flexible solution’ A solution that is easy to implement, increases efficiency and expense visibility. Extremely responsive and customer service oriented. Eliminates redundancy by simplifying the overall submission process.”

Dan ONeal. VP Finance

“We put it in our company. The implementation and use were so easy and effective that we have now rolled it out to 7 sister companies.”

Rich K. IT Network Administrator

Excellent product – Excellent service SutiSoft has saved our company time & money with a easy to use platform. The service that we have received has been exceptional!”

Jessica Seaholm. Operations Administrator

2. Coupa – Procurement Software

Founded: 2006

Prime Location: USA

Pricing: N/A

About Coupa:

Coupa is an integrated cloud-based procure-to-pay solution that addresses all aspects of the purchasing process and improves the visibility that procurement teams need over the entire process. With advanced features and capabilities, Coupa helps businesses achieve efficiency in the procurement process while keeping operational costs within the allocated budget.

Key Features

Requisition: Suggests products from preferred vendors to alert employees on discounted prices and assists them across the purchasing process.
Open Buy: Coupa Open Buy centralizes products’ data from all the preferred suppliers (both punchouts and hosted catalogs) and allows employees to compare product details before making an order. This reduces rogue spending and increases savings in the procurement process.
Track Spend Against Budgets: Real-time budget dashboards help you ensure that there is a sufficient budget before committing to spend.
Spend Guard: Leverage advanced AI and machine learning techniques to detect errors and eliminate fraud automatically from the purchasing process.
Mobile App: Create, review, and approve requisitions and POs on the move with a fully responsive mobile app.
Contract Management: Contract creation and automated contract enforcement at the time of spend ensure that you always get the offers and discounts you negotiated.

What Customers Say About Coupa

“Overall my experience has been fantastic! I am beginning to get reporting at a detailed level that I’ve never had, I enjoy the audit trails and Audit oversights

Garth S. Media Production

“It is very easy for the end user and supplier to submit invoices. Suppliers are able to track the invoice process and payments. Helps reduce the time spent communicating with suppliers.”

Sean B. Computer Software

3. SAP Ariba – Procurement Software

Founded: 1996

Prime Location: USA

Pricing: $50/Month

About SAP Ariba:

SAP Ariba procure-to-pay is an online procurement solution that provides users with a fast, guided buying experience. As it is offered as a subscription-based service, you don’t have to install anything and instead just pay and use the software instantly for your purchasing processes.

Key Features

Guided Buying: Assists employees in purchasing products and services from the preferred vendors, processes, and policies and thereby helps you avail special discounts from vendors and reduce costs.
Spot Buy Capability: Simplifies the emergency purchasing process by enabling you to configure a single source for all indirect purchases.
Mobile App: The procurement mobile application allows you to communicate and stay connected with your team and make timely decisions on the move. You can create, review, and approve requisitions and POs from anywhere with a smartphone.
Data Analytics: Map spend data to individual business units and track spend by department, employees, and invoice amount with real-time spend analytics.
Taxes Support: The software allows you to configure automated workflows to add and validate taxes and charges on requisitions, POs, invoices, and invoice reconciliations and thereby helps you reduce invoice exceptions.

What Customers Say About Ariba

“It’s an excellent tool to key invoices in less than 5 minutes and that is great for collection team also the features in order to track the invoice status and avoid payment delay.”

Marvin A. Computer Software

“Overall I like Ariba. It is fairly easy to use and navigate, and provides a one-stop SAP for it’s clients.”

Amy O. Executive Office

4. Zycus – Procurement Software

Founded: 1998

Prime Location: USA

Pricing: N/A

About Zycus:

Zycus’ procure-to-pay solution specifically addresses first-generation P2P adoption challenges such as a complicated requisition approval process, difficult-to-use tools, difficulty in purchasing required products and services at affordable prices, and lack of control over the process.

Key Features

Guided Requisition Management: Exclusive guided buying technology ensures employees purchase products and services from the partnered supplier catalogs for any requisition.
Simplified PO Management: Rule-based PO creation and management eliminates double data entry with easy flipping of requisition to POs.
Data Insights: The software provides actionable insights into spend data and helps you make result-driven decisions that can add value to the organization.
Automated Workflows: Configure automated approval workflows based on employee, department, and invoice amount, and reduce approval turnaround time.
Robust Catalog Management: Zycus’ centralized platform helps you configure customized user access rules to ensure that only authorized employees can access and edit product details.

What Customers Say About Zycus

“The system works well, no strong changes are needed to improve.”

Merry S. Sales and Marketing

“Competitive bidding on our outsourcing with easy-to-compare reporting. Reduction in Supplier base through events to select strategic partners.”

Jennifer (Pfalzgraf) P. Supplier Compliance Program Manager

5. Procurify – Procurement Software

Founded: 2012

Prime Location: Canada

Pricing: $499.00/month

About Procurify:

Procurify is a robust procurement platform specially designed to empower businesses worldwide to develop a proactive spend culture. It provides procurement teams with various advanced tools to effectively manage the entire purchase process from requisition creation to approval, PO creation, goods delivery, and vendor payments.

Key Features

Automate Approvals: Improve approval turnaround time by creating multi-level approval workflows by dollar thresholds, users, departments, and even custom fields.
Integrated Platform: Easily create purchase requisitions and get approvals, build purchase orders, receive items, and reconcile payments within a single interface.
Budget Management: Create a budget by location, department, and employee, and track spend across the purchasing process with real-time graphs that compare specified budgets vs. committed spend.
Supplier Management: Evaluate your vendor’s performance against various metrics such as speed, quality, accuracy, price, and more, and implement better strategies to improve their productivity.
Mobile App: Robust procurement mobile app allows you to capture, save, and store receipts on a secure cloud-based platform easily. Create, approve, and receive requisitions and POs via smartphone in just a few seconds and speed up the procurement process.

What Customers Say About Procurify

“Has a plenty of useful features and works without bugs. The soft is helpful for financial management. Good customer support, I contacted them several times and they were very polite.”

Michael H. HR-manager

Easy to use, makes ordering easy. Customer support is solid. Basically, submitting purchases and approval process is now very simple since we switched to Procurify.

Israel T. Purchasing Manager