10 Best Procure-to-Pay Software in 2024

Procure-to-pay is a partial ERP. It provides support for the purchasing process, flowing data through to AP. This workflow saves time and removes the risk of human error in data entry, which is called transposition error. Procure-to-pay is sometimes known as purchase-to-pay and is abbreviated to P2P.

Here is our list of the best procure-to-pay software available on the market today:

1. Precoro: Best procure-to-pay software for small businesses. An inventory management package that is delivered from the cloud and includes extensive purchasing and invoice processing features.
2. Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement: Best procure-to-pay software for large enterprises. This is a very comprehensive procurement package that includes supplier assessments, requests for quotes, contracts management, and automated invoice processing.
3. Redwood Business Process Automation: Best accounting software for procure-to-pay. This package is part of a full finance automation platform and its functions carry through to payment validation and fraud detection. This is a closed-loop system that validates all conditions to block off insider and external theft attempts.
4. Dolibarr: Best on-premises procure-to-pay software. A fantastic free ERP, CRM, and supply chain management package that includes automated processing of purchase documentation through to payment and installs on Windows and Linux.
5. Odoo Purchase: Best free procure-to-pay software. This free purchase management system is part of a suite of units that cover all manner of business software. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Docker.
6. Oracle NetSuite: Best procure-to-pay software for medium-sized businesses. NetSuite is Oracle’s ERP solution for SMEs. It includes procurement, inventory, and accounts payables modules, which together provide purchase-to-pay data flows.
7. Flectra: Best procure-to-pay software for startups. This ERP package is almost identical to Odoo. The system is available in a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise Edition.
8. Lightyear: Best procure-to-pay software for sole traders. This cloud-based system offers purchasing and inventory management systems with great invoice processing features and an approvals workflow.
9. ZipBooks: Best purchase-to-pay software for consultancies. This SaaS accounting package is very strong in managing employee purchases and expenses processing, which is ideal if most of your staff are always out on client sites.
10. Intuit QuickBooks: Best purchase-to-pay software for professional services. This well-known online accounting package is ideal for small businesses and allows expenses and purchases to be entered into the system for accounting.

In procure-to-pay, you need to follow the flow of acquisition events. This sequence is characterized in four stages:

• Selection
• Ordering
• Receiving
• Invoice processing

This process might seem familiar to you. You probably know about three-way matching. This, traditionally, was a manual paper-based process. Three-way matching concerns the last three stages of P2P. The extra step in this four-stage system is the approvals process that precedes the ordering step.

Each of the four steps requires validation before they can be closed. These are:

1. Selection Did the buyer follow procedures and get full approval for a corruption-free purchase?
2. Ordering Does the purchase order match the agreed quote?
3. Receiving Do goods received notes (GRNs) match the description of the goods shown on the order?
4. Invoice processing Do GRNs show that all of the items listed on the invoice were received in good condition?

The Best procure-to-pay software

Today, it is very common for the documents involved in procure-to-pay processing to be generated in digital format. This makes automated verification of each stage a lot easier. While approvals still require human intervention, three-way matching involves data flows that can be performed by software. Good procure-to-pay systems should include detection systems that spot potential fraud or hacker intervention.

Best cloud accounting software reviewed

1. Precoro

Best procure-to-pay software for small businesses.

Best for:

Precoro is a financial package that is priced per user, so it is easy to expand an account as you add on more staff. The tool includes approvals workflows and document flows, so you can keep track of costs and prevent employee fraud with ease.

Key Features:

• The Precoro system focuses on inventory management and pulls in functions for supplier management, purchasing, and invoicing. These functions all flow together within the SaaS dashboard. Importantly, this includes data flows. The system guides through item selection, inventory management, and restocking.
• The supplier management system includes a scoring system so you can identify candidate suppliers for each product. The sub-accounts for users and the approvals workflow in the console allow you to give system access to employees and set budget limits so large purchases need to be sent through to a manager, while other decisions can be approved at a lower level. The approval process is automated and blocks purchases until passed.
• The inventory section can automate purchase requirements and generate purchase orders. The goods received noted entered into the system require the selection of a PO first, which gets a 3-way matching set up for when the invoice arrives.
• Invoice processing allows for tolerances and it is also possible to adjust the PO to reflect last-minute changes.
• Precoro offers integrations with Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and other accounting packages.

Ease of use:

Precoro is very easy to use and its automation removes the dangers of transposition errors. This is a good tool for a sole trader moving through to medium-sized enterprises. So, it will easily support organizational growth.

Cost:

There is one plan for Precoro but there are two plan levels. Accounts that have up to 20 users cost $35 per month per user. Precoro offers volume discounts for accounts with more than 20 users – contact Precoro for a quote. You can get a guided demo of the tool or access a 14-day free trial.

2. Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement

Best procure-to-pay software for large enterprises.

Best for:

This procurement package is part of Oracle’s wider ERP system. As the name explains, Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement is a hosted SaaS package. The system can be used as a standalone package to manage procure-to-pay, or it can be subscribed to as part of the entire ERP that will assemble your accounts automatically. This package is aimed at large organizations. Oracle offers NetSuite for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Key Features:

• This package covers all of the phases of procurement, starting with supplier management. The system allows employee user accounts to start the purchase process by raising a requisition. One administrative overhead with the system is the requirement that a supplier profile needs to be set up for any purchase, no matter how small.
• A requisition gets routed through an approval process. This can be stratified to give different approvers by price limit and also include a specification for multiple approvals. Each user will be linked to a group with an approvals hierarchy defined, so users can’t go out of their departments to get approval for a purchase.
• Once a requisition has been approved, Oracle will generate a Purchase Order (PO). The PO number becomes the primary reference for the goods transaction through to payment, although other identifiers, such as the Goods Received Note Number and Invoice Number will be attached to the PO Number as the purchase-to-pay process continues.
• The system enables a Request for Quotes procedure and Blanket Purchase Orders (Standing Orders) with Releases. Contracts and Contract Purchase Orders can also be set up in the system.
• The system will automatically match POs and GRNs to invoices when they are entered into the system – this is because the PO Number is a required field in the invoice screen. If you also use Oracle Payables and General Ledger, the data from the Procurements module will flow through to your accounts.

Ease of use:

The Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement system is very comprehensive but it requires a lot of setting up and adjusting. Your users will certainly need training and you will need a specialist systems administrator to manage the package behind the scenes.

Cost:

Oracle doesn’t publish a price list for the Cloud Procurements system. You need to contact the Sales Department to get a quote. You can also request a demo.

3. Redwood Business Process Automation

Best accounting software for procure-to-pay

Best for:

Redwood Business Process Automation provides a thorough procure-to-pay suite as part of a wider finance automation platform that adds workload processing functions to your ERP – this is not, in itself, an ERP package. If you don’t have an ERP system, you could join together your current finance packages with this tool. The procure-to-pay section of the platform ensures that data flows from one application to the next, allowing matching to confirm invoice validity.

Key features:

• The ultimate goal of the entire workflow in Redwood Business Process Automation is to ensure that payments are made correctly. This aim requires chaining back to the beginning of the entire purchasing process. The strategy of the tool is to eliminate as many manual steps as possible. That’s great for cutting payroll costs, removing human error, and speeding up all of the activities of your back office.
• The platform interacts with your ERP or disjointed applications and substitutes automation for the activities of your staff. This means that all of those tools that you use will need to be connected to the network and accessible to the Redwood system.
• Introducing Redwood might produce friction among your businesses information hoarders and empire builders. However, those strategists have been holding back the efficiency of your business and they will need to be re-educated out of their political behavior. This means that the introduction of Redwood is a radical innovation of business processes.
• The action of purchasing goods has two destinations in your business – those goods will either go into inventory or be fixed assets. Redwood dataflow distinguishes between these and automatically makes entries in AP and FA ledgers accordingly.
• The Redwood system tracks POs and GRNs and then manages payments, including prepayments and payment cycles. The service also performs bank reconciliation and automatically generates general ledger entries and period closing checklists.

Ease of use:

Redwood’s specialty is that it orchestrates the applications that you already use. So, ease of use for end-users is not an issue because they will just carry on using the systems that they already know. Setting the system up takes time, but it is guided and the overview of a workflow is created by a type of process flow diagram, which any system administrator should e able to construct.

Cost:

Redwood doesn’t publish its prices – you need to get a quote. Remember that this process automation package doesn’t include the cost of the actual accounting packages that this service strings together.

4. Dolibarr

Best on-premises procure-to-pay software.

Best for:

Although the next recommendation is for a free package, the Dolibarr system could also qualify for that crown because it is free to use. This procure-to-pay service is part of a wider ERP and CRM suite, all of which is free, so you could manage your entire business and compile your accounts with this package.

Key Features:

• The Dolibarr system is available for Windows and Linux. It can be networked, so multiple users can access the system, just like any corporate ERP system.
• The Purchase and Supply section of Dolibarr covers inventory and stock management as well as the transactions that acquire goods. The Inventory system includes a stock level feature that can have restock levels placed on them. The setting of restocking levels is a manual process and is a field in the item description input screen. However, once that service is set up it will notify you went items need to be reordered.
• Purchasing can be put in a workflow from requisition, approval, PO generation, GRN entry, and invoice matching.
• The screens of the system look good and they are well-planned. The look and feel of the dashboard are as good as any of the paid services that offer the same breadth of business and account management.
• If you set up the ledgers in the Dolibarr system, you can get transactional data transferred automatically into your accounts.

Ease of use:

The dashboard for the Dolibarr system is well laid out with a clear menu structure that makes functions easy to reach. Some of the functions, such as the creation of the chart of accounts, are guided, which enables small business users to manage their organize their operations through the Dolibarr free ERP system.

Cost:

Dolibarr is completely free. There is no paid version.

5. Odoo Purchase

Best free procure-to-pay software.

Best for:

Odoo is an ERP system built around two free modules: Purchase and Invoicing. If you only use those two modules, you don’t have to pay anything. If you add on extra modules, you have to pay for those other functions, and the Purchase and Invoicing systems become charged for as well.

Key Features:

• The free Purchase module allows you to set up supplier details records and the import supplier price lists into them. This can be restricted to approved products rather than the entire item catalog of that vendor.
• Procurement management features in the package include the ability to set up a request for quotes process to accept, manage, and rank bids for supply.
• The system can generate purchase orders, including standing orders and releases. When the Purchase module is paired with an Invoice unit, POs can be matched to invoices. The invoicing section can also be used to process contractor timesheets.
• To get the full journey from Purchase to Invoice processing, you also need the Inventory module. The Inventory system gives you goods receiving and also stock replenishment levels.

Ease of use:

Using the Purchase module by itself would be a little frustrating because it only aids productivity if the workflows between that system and the Inventory and Invoice units are available.

Cost:

The combination of Purchase, Inventory, and Invoice costs $84 per month with one user account when paid annually. The price increases by $28 per month for each extra user. The package can be taken on a month-by-month basis. In that case, the price increases to $105 per month with one user and £35 per month for each extra user.

6. Oracle NetSuite

Best procure-to-pay software for medium-sized businesses.

Best for:

NetSuite is Oracle’s ERP solution for SMEs. It includes procurement, inventory, and accounts payables modules, which together provide purchase-to-pay data flows. This is a closed-loop system that reduces the dangers of human error and uses data from different modules to provide validation and reconciliation.

Key Features:

The SaaS system includes supplier management, inventory stock level reordering, requisitioning, approvals, PO generation, GRN entry, invoice processing, and 3-way matching.

7. Flectra

Best procure-to-pay software for startups.

Best for:

This ERP package is almost identical to Odoo. The system is available in a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise Edition. The Enterprise Edition is available on the cloud or for installation on Linux. The free version also runs on Linux. This combination is a great opportunity for startups who can begin with the free version and then migrate to the Enterprise Edition.

Key Features:

The Purchase module works best when combined with the Invoice and Inventory systems. This combination gets a data flow from stock levels through to invoice processing.

8. Lightyear Business

Best procure-to-pay software for sole traders.

Best for:

This cloud-based system offers purchasing and inventory management systems with great invoice processing features and an approvals workflow. The Lightyear system is offered in three editions: Starter, Business, and Enterprise. The Starter plan doesn’t include procure-to-pay functions.

Key Features:

The Business package focuses on inventory management and triggers requisitions, approvals, purchasing, receiving, and invoice processing from stock requirements/

9. ZipBooks

Best purchase-to-pay software for consultancies.

Best for: 

This SaaS accounting package is very strong in managing employee purchases and expenses processing, which is ideal if most of your staff are always out on client sites. As consultancies don’t process stock, the expenses of their consultants in the field are the closest they will get to a purchase-to-pay process.

Key Features:

You can account for expenses with the Starter plan, which is free. However, the Smarter plan enables consultants to upload expenses and timesheets, producing automation from purchase through to accounting.

 10. Intuit QuickBooks

Best overall cloud accounting software.

Best for:

This well-known online accounting package is ideal for small businesses and allows expenses and purchases to be entered into the system for accounting. The system includes an Inventory module in its top edition, Advanced, which costs $90.

Key Features:

This easy-to-use package is geared towards assembling accounts for tax reporting. There are four plans, which offer different levels of functions suitable for professional offices up to stock handling businesses.