Modern procurement addresses a variety of challenges by leveraging the right data and technology to optimize processes, improve visibility, and control spend. Teams seek to automate tasks that reduce manual effort and costs while creating a central repository for information.
The right tools can eliminate fraud and errors by providing a single source of truth, with streamlined approval workflows, audit trails, and reporting capabilities.
Companies that are looking to enhance spend management, improve compliance, and mitigate risk need a procurement management solution that will optimize and automate key processes that reduce effort, time, and costs.
Two top brands on the market are Procurify and Zip Intake-to-Procure. This article will examine both procure-to-pay platforms, including a brief overview, key features, and ways they overlap. We’ll also look at how these SaaS products work in conjunction, and how they operate individually.
Procurify: Real-time Visibility Over Business Spend
Procurify is a cloud-based procurement software solution designed to help a company streamline its purchasing process, from requisition to payment. Track spending in real-time from a centralized platform where businesses can manage their entire procurement lifecycle and automate key tasks.
Reduce the time and effort needed to manage manual activities, with features like approval workflows, purchase order creation, vendor management, budget tracking, inventory management, and more.
Using Procurify, companies can improve their purchasing efficiency, gain better visibility, reduce costs, and exercise greater control over spending. The platform offers reporting and analytics capabilities, as well as:
- Flexible Spend Control: Eliminate rogue spending and remove purchasing bottlenecks with 100% pre-approved spending, budget and audit compliance, and real-time visibility.
- Modern Mobility: Track spending wherever, whenever, and however buying takes place with intuitive purchasing workflows and a modern browser-based UI.
- Seamless Integrations: Integrates seamlessly with your accounting system or ERP to automate data workflows between finance and procurement, including NetSuite, QuickBooks, and via API.
- Vendor Management: Manage all vendor information and track vendor performance, including delivery times, quality, and pricing. It also enables users to generate vendor reports and scorecards, making it easier to evaluate performance and make informed decisions.
- Purchase Order Management: Create, approve, and track purchase orders in real time. Users can set up customized approval workflows and notifications, ensuring all purchases are properly authorized and tracked.
Procurify is purchasing software that helps an organization streamline its procurement processes and optimize buying decisions.
Why Companies Choose Procurify
Companies choose Procurify for a variety of reasons, including:
Customizable Workflows
Procurify enables users to set up custom approval workflows and notifications, ensuring all purchases are properly tracked and authorized. This allows companies to better implement policies and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
Reporting and Analytics
Reporting and analytics capabilities that allow users to generate customized reports and gain insights into key purchasing patterns. This information can then be used to optimize purchasing processes, improve performance, and forecast future trends.
Better Spend Visibility
The Procurify platform offers real-time spend visibility, allowing companies to monitor budgets, track expenses, and identify cost-saving opportunities. Set spending limits and alerts, ensuring purchases are always within budget.
Top Integrations
Procurify integrates with popular accounting and ERP systems, including Xero, NetSuite, and QuickBooks. This allows organizations to streamline procurement and reduce the time and effort required for manual data entry.
Procurify scored 4.6 out of 5 (132 reviews) on G2.
Procurify scored 4.5 out of 5 (140 reviews) on Capterra.
Zip Intake-to-Procure: Modern Spend Control Management
Zip is one of the world’s leading intake-to-pay platforms, providing a single source of truth for employees to initiate a purchase or vendor request. The seamless upstream experience increases employee adoption, helps manage spend, and mitigate risk.
The system guides requesters to preferred suppliers, while automatically routing the approval workflows for every new purchase or vendor to the right team, at the right time.
Zip allows companies to gain clearer visibility across all purchases, increasing operational efficiency and helping to control costs. Launch in less than six weeks and let Zip serve as your orchestration layer, integrating into core systems, and allowing key stakeholders to keep their own tools.
What are some of the top capabilities of the Zip platform?
- Effortless Front Door: Improve the employee experience, ask just the right questions, and provide key intake templates, leading to a greater level of adoption, with total visibility.
- Customized Approval Chains: Send notifications to stakeholders at the right time, for each purchase request, and customize approval workflows.
- Onboarding Suppliers: Zip categorizes existing vendors, then flags any overlap automatically, from software to staffing agencies.
- Key Integrations: Pre-built API connectors to the systems like Slack, Oracle, JIRA, Ironclad, Procurify, leading CLMs, and GRC systems.
- Zero-Coding Required: Flexible and extensible workflow without the need for coding or help from IT. No complicated implementation.
Zip is an end-to-end eprocurement system that guides teams every step of the way through the intake to purchasing process. It works to proactively rationalize supplier contracts, while strengthening vendor relationships and improving employee adoption.
Why Companies Choose Zip
The Zip platform allows companies to gain clear and timely visibility across their entire procurement lifecycle, from the moment of intake to the purchasing process. Zip has been recognized as a 2022 ProcureTech100 Company (next to teams like Airbase and Coupa) for its fast time-to-value, ease of use, and comprehensive intake-to-procure solution.
Companies use Zip to mitigate risk, increase operational efficiency, and gain better control over spend. It also enhances the employee experience and empowers vendor onboarding with automatic contract management.
Here are a few of the countless reasons why companies choose Zip:
Guided Intake Process
Average employees are more focused on their job than the policies of the finance, legal, or IT department. Zip intake-to-pay fills in the gaps by providing a guided buying experience from start to finish.
The system can be easily configured to loop in the right stakeholders, exactly when they are needed, and serves as an intuitive front door to all of your ERP and P2P systems. Zip is procurement management software that will also automatically generate purchase requests and purchase orders as needed.
Complete Customization
The Zip procurement solution enables users to customize workflows and approval processes without the need to write code or hire a developer. This level of configuration ensures compliance with policies and regulations, and reduces the risk of errors or delays.
Analytics and Reporting
Zip provides in-depth reporting and analytics that allows users to track spend in real-time, monitor supplier performance, identify key trends, and find opportunities to save on costs. Businesses can then make more informed decisions that are driven by intelligent data.
Risk and Spend Management
A centralized procurement process helps to maintain financial integrity, manage the entire vendor lifecycle, and reduce rogue spend. Zip allows a business to customize workflows and channel requests to existing vendors and contracts, while automating renewals throughout the process.
Additional Reasons to Choose Zip
- Short Learning Curve: Little change management and no extensive, on-premise training required.
- Operational Efficiency: Quick deployment in eight weeks or less and reduce administrative burden by 40%.
- Key Integrations: Integrates disparate platforms like ERP, CLM, P2P, CLM, SSO, and ticketing, as well as top names like SAP Ariba and JAGGAER.
Zip scored 4.8 out of 5 (38 reviews) on G2.
Zip scored 4.8 out of 5 (22 reviews) on Capterra.
The Overlap Between Procurify and Zip
Zip and Procurify are designed for all companies, mid-market organizations, and large enterprises. Both systems help improve visibility into spend and effectively manage supplier relationships.
Features range from purchase requisitions to approval workflows, insightful reporting, expense categorization, and supplier onboarding.
Zip and Procurify provide a user-friendly interface with reasonable pricing. Both systems offer AI-powered technology and automation of manual tasks.
Zip and Procurify share other features like:
- Automated approval workflows
- Spend and asset management
- PO and PR creation
- Vendor management
- Integrations with top ERPs and P2Ps
How Zip Intake-to-Procure Complements Traditional Business Spend Management Strategies
Business spend management (BSM) is a concept that has been around for almost as long as procurement. It’s the act of keeping an eye on where expenses are being made, and tightening the controls around buying. The fewer repetitive manual tasks employees have to perform, the happier and more productive they will be. The same goes for vendors. Self-service portals enable a higher level of visibility and control that boosts vendor retention and empowers relationships.
In traditional BSM routes, the approval process can take days, and even weeks, requiring upwards of five or six approvals before a purchase order is created. It’s an incredibly disjointed system that leads to lost time, more effort, and increased costs.
Solutions like Zip Procure-to-Pay augment traditional BSM strategies by automating the intake and vendor management process. There’s a higher level of visibility, accountability, and collaboration. It’s a single tool an employee can use to initiate a much-needed purchase, route it for approval, and automatically create a purchase order.
Why is Zip so popular?
Just ask the tech-enabled moving and storage company, Clutter. Before a dedicated procurement function was created, all purchasing processes were run by finance. The only technology they had available was NetSuite, and there was no other sourcing or procurement technology in place.
Clutter needed a procurement solution that was purpose-built to automate its intake and approvals process, placing an emphasis on speed, visibility, and user experience.
Clutter quickly implemented Zip’s intake-to-procure solution in less than 8 weeks and integrated it with their core technologies (NetSuite ERP, OKTA SSO, and Slack) with very little involvement from IT.
As a result, Clutter increased PO-backed spend by 18%, and their procurement function was able to increase savings by 24.5%.
As Rebeca Reyes, Supply Chain Lead/Procurement Ops of Clutter, puts it:
“Prior to Zip, even with attempts to train employees, about 85% of purchase requests that were submitted were coded and/or configured incorrectly because our coding logic is very particular and the previous system was too rigid. With Zip, this number has gone to almost 0%.”
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