The Purchasing Software Buyer’s Guide 2024

What is Purchasing Software?

A purchasing software is a platform that automates the purchasing process and connects purchasing functions with accounting functions automatically. By doing this, it promotes better financial awareness and purchasing records, as well as providing cost savings and time savings. Purchasing software is typically implemented by buyers and accounting departments.

While there are similarities between purchasing and procure-to-pay software, purchasing software usually handles the purchasing lifecycle in a supply chain. It connects to ERPs, accounting software, and inventory control tools.

Purchasing software can be used for:

• Automating the purchasing process & limiting direct human input
• Streamlining supply ordering process
• Managing vendors efficiently
• Authenticating invoices & eliminating fraud with document matching
• Store supply data & provide trends and insights into your purchasing history

Purchasing software simplifies the procurement process cycle, all the way from sourcing to settling vendor invoices & avoiding invoice fraud. Whether you’re a small, medium, or growing business, you need purchasing software to help manage the entire process.

Why Do Companies Need Purchasing Software?

Purchasing software streamlines the process of getting the supplies your organization needs to run your day-to-day operations. This protects your supply chain, makes your organization more agile, and reduces the time and energy needed to get goods and services to your customers.

Here are some of the reasons why you may consider getting a purchasing software to streamline your procurement.

• Speeds up the purchasing process

Purchasing software automates the purchasing process and enables organizations of all sizes to quickly complete tasks that would have required direct human input to solve. This means that the purchasing process runs smoother and supplies get delivered quicker than before. It makes your organization more agile, gets more done with less, and adds more value to your customers and stakeholders.

• Simplifies customer-vendor relationships

The customer-vendor relationship is the backbone of a purchasing process. This is the chain through which information passes and supplies get delivered from. Purchasing software streamlines that communication process so that both sides can exchange information effectively and get more done.

A purchasing software helps you:

1. Record and store historical vendor performance data
2. Collect purchase requests and send them as orders to suppliers with just a click
3. Record and store supplier invoices for payment and
4. Eliminate invoice fraud

Purchasing software helps in managing the customer-vendor relationship for a truly win-win relationship.

• Reduces the risk of supply shortages

It’s always a stressful time when there’s an urgent need for a particular supply and it turns out that there’s less than required at the moment. Records were kept to show when supplies were running low, but since those warehouse records were all stored in spreadsheets, no one could make any sense of them when needed. But purchasing system software can be programmed to keep track of supply quantities and update them as they’re checked out from the warehouse. Once supplies get to a certain level, notifications are created, informing the purchasing department to place new orders to prevent running out. This mechanism ensures that essential supplies are restocked on autopilot.

• Reduces cost

Another key area where purchasing software comes in handy is in the cost reduction equation. An ideal purchasing software does more than just help you purchase from vendors. It helps you reduce cost by offering a wide range of suppliers to choose from. Given you can explore different suppliers, check out their pricing, and consider their terms, purchasing software ensures you can get the best supplies at the most reasonable prices. Likewise, using the accounts payable tools built into your purchasing software, it’s possible to negotiate better rates with suppliers and get discounts on invoices by paying ahead of time.

• Keep a firm yet flexible control overspending

Growing organizations are always in a procurement dilemma. It’s either you put firm controls on overspending and stifle the purchasing process, or you give employees unlimited leeway to make purchases as they wish. And that’s another huge problem area on its own. Giving employees unchecked access to order supplies as they wish easily leads to a situation where several individuals or departments make repeat orders of the same supply—simply because there’s no source of truth to see what’s going on.

Purchasing software changes all that.

Using a purchasing software like Kissflow Procurement Cloud, you can give employees the freedom to make purchase requests and at the end, route all those requests to your procurement team for approval. This creates a situation where employees have a say in the purchasing process, but the procurement team maintains overall control to eliminate duplicate spending.

• Creates transparency

Transparency is another place where purchasing software is useful since it helps you discover what’s working, what’s not working, and if there are any opportunities for saving on your purchases. Purchasing software helps you organize your procurement, save on costs, and brings everything into one source of truth that’s easy to manage.

How Kissflow Transformed Purchasing for SAPIN?

SAPIN is a packaging conglomerate with operations across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It creates packaging solutions for industries across the electronics, food, and chemical industries.

Prior to leveraging Kissflow’s purchasing software, SAPIN depended on a complicated purchasing process that was hard to scale. Every day, SAPIN’s procurement department was handling dozens of purchase requests from their 200+ employees with just forms & spreadsheets. Over time, it was evident that such a model was getting hard to scale. Purchase requests were getting out of hand for the procurement team to handle and operations were being held up due to shortages.

And that’s where Kissflow came in.

By taking a long hard look at SAPIN’s purchasing systems and processes, we could instantly see three key areas that needed work, namely:

• A cloud-based purchasing software that employees could access 24/7 without asking for files to be shared
• Conditional programming to customize workflows depending on the type of task needed to be carried out
• SLA notifications had to be automated to keep the finance and procurement departments on the same page

By deploying Kissflow Procurement Cloud to manage their purchasing process, SAPIN was able to effectively transform their entire purchasing process to be faster and more efficient. Using Kissflow, SAPIN managed to:

• Cut down lead time for purchase orders by 75%
• Create workflows with custom programming and accommodate different ordering scenarios
• Create one source of truth for the entire organization to manage purchasing from

Kissflow Procurement Cloud empowers your organization to transform your purchasing with one simple tool: automation. Using Kissflow Procurement Cloud, you can:

• Empower your entire organization with a cloud-based purchasing tool
• Collect purchases requests from across your organization into one source of truth
• Evaluate vendor performance with in-depth analytics
• Manage vendors with clarity and ease and
• Eliminate invoice fraud.

Kissflow simplifies procurement no matter your company’s size and gives you the tools you need to create a winning purchasing process. Take Kissflow for a spin now!.