Zip has announced the launch of a unified platform for procurement, consolidating the tools and processes needed for the end-to-end procurement lifecycle. Following the introduction of Intake-to-Pay, Zip looks to extend its Intake-to-Procure platform to provide advanced Procure-to-Pay capabilities, including purchase order (PO) management, accounts payable (AP) automation and global B2B payments functionality.

Zip’s Intake-to-Pay and what it means for the procurement lifecycle Businesses are set to benefit from comprehensive spend orchestration in a single platform, resulting in increased control and visibility over spend, improved AP efficiency and support for compliant purchasing processes. Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip advised that the launch of Zip Intake-to-Pay enables businesses to implement a holistic and easy-to-adopt procurement experience that has no requirement for additional training. Per their statement, Zip’s solution starts with Intake and addresses the end-user experience to drive increased adoption across the organisation via simplified PO management and payments, which is believed to result in better spend visibility, integrity, and control.

The announced features include: Zip PO Management. Teams are enabled to create Zip POs from approved requests, manage open Zip purchase orders on their PO dashboard, send POs to vendors through the Zip vendor portal, manage change orders with the appropriate approvals, and sync PO data to the ERP. Zip AP Automation. Companies are offered invoice inbox an email sync, vendor portal invoice uploads, multi-language optical character recognition (OCR), and automated two-way matching.

Making use of Zip’s workflow engine, invoices can be dynamically routed for approval based on support for advanced conditions. Zip B2B Payments. Businesses can carry out payments domestically via ACH, wire, and paper checks and pay worldwide via wires and local payment rails across over 40 currencies and 130 countries, while also offering payment batching and approvals together with multi-subsidiary support and direct debit support for automated funding. The announcement states that Zip’s automated approval workflows enable business stakeholders to be looped in for bill approvals and acknowledge the goods and services that have been received.

Once invoices are reviewed and approved for payment, account payable teams can have vendor payments managed across subsidiaries and currencies. Businesses are enabled to leverage Zip Intake-to-Pay to decrease purchasing cycle times, minimise the time spent towards manual procurement operations and redirect employees’ time towards more strategic activities. This is believed to better employee adoption of pre-approved spending, which ultimately helps drive savings.

Additionally, customisable workflows enable accurate tracking and matching of both POs and invoices, resulting in increased internal efficiencies and improved accuracy. Commenting on this, Zaparde added that improved spend management starts at the point of intake. Per their statement, legacy procurement-to-pay systems are not designed to support distributed purchasing patterns that modern businesses are known for, adding that they are inefficient, complex to implement, and lack dynamic customisation.

The spokesperson believes that this results in broken processes and encourages non-PO-backed spending that contributes to non-compliance. Intake-to-Pay looks to address these challenges by having the entire spend lifecycle unified and adoption ensured throughout the entire employee base. .