CODA’s e-Procurement offering is simple: the complete cycle, from procurement to payment, available online. A number of competing procurement suites on the market are simply portals that host online supplier catalogues. They automate the ordering process, but don’t link to the user’s systems so staff can raise POs on the site, but not from their own systems. There is no integration back into the customers’ finance and procurement systems and no link with requisitioning systems.

The CODA solution, however, is a true end-to-end B2B (Business-to-Business) e-commerce solution, with CODA-Financials as the finance engine and CODA e-Procurement connecting the user organisation to its suppliers and customers across the Internet quickly and securely. This creates a paperless procurement process and allows all users to share realtime financial and purchasing information. As a result, companies are able to significantly cut operational costs and improve management control by reducing paper flow and speeding-up the procurement process.

By managing the complete purchasing process from finance through to supplier and back again, companies have strategic control over all aspects of the function. They can closely monitor expenditure against budgets, a key aspect of controlling the purchasing process. The integration between CODA-Financials and CODA e-Procurement also allows businesses to move to commitment accounting – which is common practice among public bodies and increasingly so in big-business. Managers can set a budget against an item and the average spend is automatically reduced once that item is purchased.