How to evaluate a procure-to-pay suite
The criteria that separate procure-to-pay suites, what an analyst quadrant does not tell you, and how to score a shortlist against your own invoices.
Most procure-to-pay evaluations are decided before they begin. A shortlist arrives from an analyst quadrant or from whoever the ERP vendor recommends, three suites demonstrate against a script written by the suites themselves, and the scoring sheet records what everybody already expected. The decision is then defended for five years.
This is how to run the other kind, and we have no suite to sell, which is the only reason we can write it down.
What an analyst quadrant answers
It answers who is large, who is growing, and who a lot of other companies have bought. That is genuinely useful and it is not nothing: a vendor that will still exist in year five matters when the contract runs that long.
It does not answer whether a suite fits your estate. Position in a quadrant is built from the analyst’s own criteria weighted the analyst’s own way, and the weighting that produced the picture is almost certainly not yours. A company whose pain is non-PO invoices and a company whose pain is supplier onboarding should not arrive at the same shortlist, and from a quadrant they usually do.
Use it to set the field. Do not use it to pick the winner.
The eight criteria that actually separate them
Feature lists converge. Every suite captures an invoice, matches it, routes it and posts it, and any of them will demonstrate that beautifully. The differences show up in the cases nobody demonstrates.
Non-PO invoices. A PO invoice matches automatically against an order and a receipt. A non-PO invoice has nothing to match against and has to be coded and routed by rules. This is where most of the manual effort sits in most companies, and it is the single largest differentiator between suites. Ask what share of your own non-PO volume each candidate would handle without a human, using your invoices rather than theirs.
Matching tolerance and exceptions. Not whether it does three-way matching, which they all do, but what happens when the match fails. Who sees the exception, how it is resolved, and whether resolving it teaches the system anything.
Supplier onboarding, and who pays for it. Some suites move the effort to your suppliers, which works with fifty strategic suppliers and fails with five thousand occasional ones. Ask what a supplier has to do to send you an invoice, and what happens to the ones who will not do it.
Mandate coverage. European e-invoicing obligations arrive on published dates and in specified formats, including EN 16931 and the Peppol network. Coverage differs by country and by suite, and a suite that is strong in one market can be weak in the market where half your suppliers are.
Approval reality. Every suite models an approval hierarchy. Fewer handle delegation, absence, thresholds that change by cost centre, and the four people who approve everything because nobody has updated the matrix since a reorganisation.
Integration with what you already run. The connector exists. The question is what it costs to keep working after your own upgrade, and who is responsible when it stops.
Retention, archiving and evidence. An invoice is a record with obligations attached, and it outlives the process that created it by years. Where it is archived, whether the archive is the suite’s own or yours, and how it comes out in an audit are decided at selection whether or not anyone discusses them.
Total cost, including exceptions. Licence plus implementation is the number in the proposal. The number that matters adds the cost of every case the suite cannot automate, which is why the non-PO answer above is a cost question rather than a feature question.
How to score it
Take one hundred real invoices from your own last quarter, including the ugly ones, and make each candidate process them. Not a scripted demonstration and not their sample data. Everything you need to know is in the exceptions.
Weight the criteria before you see the results, and write the weighting down. Weighting after the fact is how the shortlist that arrived at the start becomes the decision at the end.
Then ask each reference customer two questions: what does your team still do by hand, and what did the implementation cost against the estimate. The answers are consistently more informative than the reference call’s agenda.
Where independence matters
We deliver on several of these platforms and we sell none of them, so we are the wrong people to ask which suite is best and the right people to ask which fits. Our part is usually the register and the criteria before selection, and the supervision after it.
The wider question underneath a suite selection is what your information is worth, what it costs to hold and what obligations attach to it, which is Information Value Management. The process itself is procure-to-pay.