A procurement process exists so that spending is agreed before it happens and paid for once. Most of the discipline is in the first two steps, not the last five.
A procurement process is the path from someone needing something to the supplier being paid for it. In a small company it is often four informal steps and a card payment; the moment it involves other people's budgets, recurring commitments, or amounts that would hurt to lose, the informal version starts producing surprises — duplicate subscriptions, a supplier nobody vetted, an invoice for work nobody remembers commissioning.
The point is not procurement as a department. It is that spending is agreed before it is committed, and that the invoice arriving later can be matched to something that was agreed.
Scale the process to the amount. A single threshold turns everything into paperwork; three tiers work better — below a small figure the budget owner just buys it, above it a purchase order and one quote, above a larger figure competitive quotes and a signed agreement. Write the thresholds down, because a rule people cannot recite is a rule that gets applied inconsistently.
Purchase order, goods received note, invoice. When all three agree, the payment is almost certainly correct; when they do not, you have found either an error or something worse before the money left. This single control catches duplicate invoices, quantities billed but not delivered, and prices that changed between order and invoice. It is also the reason the purchase order step is not bureaucracy — without it there is nothing to match the invoice against, and approval becomes a judgement about whether an amount looks plausible.
In Ettex, requests fit Ettex Forms — one form with budget line, amount, supplier and reason, landing timestamped in a shared inbox with file uploads for quotes. The purchase order and the invoice live in Ettex Invoices: line items with quantities, rates, multiple tax rates and discounts, notes and terms fields where the PO and contract references belong, sequential auto-numbering with your own prefix, a client and supplier book so entity names stay consistent between documents, and statuses so nothing sits in an ambiguous state. Supplier records and contacts sit in Ettex Contacts, the agreement goes through Ettex Signature, and the policy with its thresholds belongs in Ettex Docs.
Plainly: Ettex has no procurement module. There is no approval routing by amount, no automatic three-way match, no supplier portal, no contract-renewal reminders, no spend analytics, and no punch-out to supplier catalogues. It gives you the documents, the numbering and a shared inbox for requests — the thresholds and the matching are a routine somebody runs. Above a few hundred purchase orders a month, buy software built for it.
Identify the need, approve the spend, select the supplier, agree terms, raise a purchase order, receive and check, then match and pay. Small purchases can compress the middle steps; the approval and the match should survive.
Checking that the purchase order, the record of goods or services received, and the supplier invoice all agree before payment. It catches duplicates, over-billing and price changes before money leaves.
Above a modest threshold, yes. Without a purchase order there is nothing to match an invoice against, and approval becomes a guess about whether the amount looks about right.
Three works well: buy it, purchase order plus one quote, competitive quotes plus a signed agreement. More tiers than people can recite get applied inconsistently.
The budget owner, and never the person who raised the request. Separating requester from approver — and both from whoever releases payment — is the core control.
Review it quarterly as a list. Subscriptions and retainers pass through procurement once and then renew silently, which is where most unnoticed spending accumulates.
A procurement process is worth exactly what its approval and matching steps are worth. Agree before committing, raise a purchase order, record receipt, match all three — and review the recurring spend that no process catches twice.
Credit control is the set of decisions made before an invoice exists — who gets terms, how much, and what happens when they slip. Chasing is what you do when those decisions were never made.
AP automation is sold as one product, but it is four separate jobs with very different payback. Capture and matching are where the software earns its price; approval and payment are mostly a question of whether anyone wrote the rules down.
Dynamic pricing in retail means moving prices with demand, stock and competition. It reliably raises margin and just as reliably damages customer trust when the rules behind it are not defensible.