By its nature, the purchase-to-pay process is a system which involves many different people and departments, and the larger the company, the greater the number of people will be involved. This means not only a time-consuming process, but each step is also a potential source of error due to manual editing of documents. Furthermore, for larger organizations a lack of transparency into the flow of the process is also an issue, leading to workflow-related questions such as: Is the order approved yet? Who has reviewed whether the delivery is complete? Who still needs to approve the invoice before it is paid?

These problems have led many companies to automate single steps (commonly invoice processing – accounts payable automation) or even the entire purchase-to-pay process in order to increase transparency, accelerate the process and save a considerable amount of time and money.