eProcureAI / Platform / Purchasing and POs
Purchasing and Purchase OrdersYour team fills in four short steps. The catalog supplies the prices, the charge code shows what is left to spend, and once it has been approved the purchase order writes itself.
This is the real screen. Every field above comes straight out of the product.
Ask anyone who has rolled out procurement software what decided it, and you tend to get the same answer. People used it because it was quick.
So that is what we built for. A requester opens one form. They give it a title, pick their department, say where it should go and when they need it. Six fields, and most of them remember themselves after the first time.
Step two is the catalog, so nobody has to describe what they want or dig out last year's price. They pick the laptop, or they pick a service like IT setup at eighty five dollars an hour, and the line total appears on its own. Step three shows the charge code with the money still available on it, on screen, before anyone has committed to anything. Step four is where the quote and the statement of work get attached.
Then they press submit and go back to their actual job. The routing rules work out who approves it and in what order, based on the department and the amount. Approvers get the whole picture in one screen and can sign off from a phone.
Nothing gets typed again. The purchase order is built from the request that was approved, so the vendor, the lines, the rates, the charge code, the delivery site and the attachments all carry across exactly as they were signed off.
That matters more than it sounds. The order your supplier receives and the order your approver agreed to are the same thing, which means fewer revisions, fewer phone calls, and a clean line running from the request through to the goods receipt and the invoice.
We cut our average PO cycle from eight days to under four hours. Our AP team went from chasing approvals all day to doing actual strategic work.Karen M., VP Finance, manufacturing, four plants, Texas
Title, department, who is asking, where it goes, when it is needed and how urgent it is. The department quietly decides which approval rule applies, and the delivery site decides which warehouse checks the goods in later. Neither is something the requester has to think about.
Products and services come from the company catalog rather than a description somebody has to interpret. Services carry a rate and a unit, so IT setup at eighty five dollars an hour or a quarterly deep clean at three hundred and fifty a visit both produce a priced line straight away.
The requester picks the charge code and sees what is left on it. Charge code 4403 for IT hardware with four thousand seven hundred available tells them right away whether this will sail through or need a word with the budget owner. Splitting across two codes happens here rather than being corrected afterwards.
Quotes and statements of work go onto the request itself. When the order is created they travel with it, so the approver, the supplier and anyone reviewing it later are all looking at the same documents.
Vendor, lines, rates, charge codes, delivery site and required date all move over untouched. There is no second round of data entry, which takes away the most common reason orders go out wrong.
The moment the order exists, its value sits in the committed column against its charge code. Budget owners see money that is promised as well as money already spent, which is the difference between a number you can plan with and a number you can only look back at.
The shipment references the order. The receiving check counts against the order lines. The invoice matches the order and the goods receipt. Get the order right and the rest of the chain runs on its own.
Procurement gets easier when the boring half moves to the software and the useful half stays with people.
Four things, none of which need training or a manual. Most people are through the whole form before their coffee goes cold.
Everything that used to mean chasing somebody, checking something twice, or copying a figure from one screen into another.
Buying twenty boxes of paper and running a laptop refresh should not follow the same path. The request is identical either way, and the road forks after approval.
| Route | When you would use it | What happens after approval | Typical value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Straight to purchase order | Catalog items from a supplier you already have terms with | Order goes out immediately, no sourcing event | Below your competition threshold |
| RFQ | You know exactly what you want and several suppliers can provide it | Quotes come in, you compare, the award creates the order | $3,000 to $50,000 |
| RFP | You need suppliers to propose an approach, not just a price | Scored against your criteria, award recorded with the reasoning | $50,000 and up |
| Reverse auction | Commodity spec with at least three suppliers who want the work | Live bidding, suppliers see their rank, award creates the order | Competitive categories |
| Blanket order | The same supplier, over and over, across a year | Releases draw down a master value, with alerts before it runs out | Annual contracts |
In the product these show up as procurement records with their own numbers. PR-F5B6E4 running as an RFQ, PR-A21C77 as an RFP being evaluated, PR-9DA031 as a reverse auction with bidding live, each still linked back to the request that started it.
Hardware, peripherals and supplies at the price you negotiated. The requester chooses, the line total appears, and nobody types in a price that is eight months out of date.
IT setup and configuration at eighty five an hour, installation at sixty, staff training at five hundred a day. Services become proper priced lines instead of a paragraph somebody has to cost up later.
A rate change is made in one place and every new request picks it up. Requests already approved keep the rate they were approved at, so the history stays honest.
Catalogs come in as a spreadsheet, so getting from nothing to a working catalog is an afternoon rather than a project.
Each service carries a plain note about when to use it, like new device rollout or quarterly office clean, so people pick the right one without asking anyone.
Anything not in the catalog goes through as a normal request and gets reviewed. Blocking people is what pushes spend onto personal cards.
Most of the questions procurement teams field are people asking where something got to. These are the states a purchase moves through.
| Status | What it means | Who has it | Usually lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draft | Started but not sent, nothing committed yet | The requester | Minutes |
| Pending approval | Routing rules applied, sitting with a named approver | Whoever is on that step | Hours |
| Exception routing | Over budget or caught by a policy, so somebody decides deliberately | Budget owner or finance | Hours to a day |
| Approved | Through every step, ready to become an order or a sourcing event | Buyer, or nobody at all | Immediate |
| Vendor selection | Sourcing event running, quotes or bids coming in | Procurement | Days to weeks |
| Order issued | Purchase order sent, value committed against the charge code | The supplier | Until delivery |
| Awaiting check | Shipment has arrived but nobody has counted it yet | The receiving site | Same day |
| Completed | Goods receipt raised, invoice matched, cleared to pay | Accounts payable | Per payment terms |
Bring your thresholds and a request type you use often. We will put a real one through the four steps with you.
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