Every Controller I know has heard some version of this from procurement: “We finally have a system.” The procurement suite is live, the approval workflows are configured, the supplier portal is up, and the steering committee has moved on. On paper, spend is under control.
Then month-end arrives. Employees still can’t figure out how to open a request, so they go around it. Nothing is connected: not the contract, not the invoice, not the ledger. And the deployment that was supposed to take work out of finance has added one more system to reconcile. More work, not less.
I’ve implemented procurement suites, sat on the steering committees and stood in front of the company at launch. I’ve watched this pattern repeat in company after company: procurement is happy to have a system, and the Controller is quietly rebuilding things in spreadsheets. Here are the three reasons why.
Procurement is measured on savings and cycle time. The Controller is measured on a clean, on-time close. A tool can win the first and leave the second untouched.
1. The spend it never sees
A procurement suite governs the spend that flows through it. That sounds obvious, but it’s where the Controller’s problems begin. The people who buy every day, the procurement team and a handful of power users, learn the system. Everyone else buys a few times a year: the engineer renewing a software subscription, the marketing manager booking an event, the plant manager ordering a part. For them it’s a portal they visit twice a year, full of forms, categories and approval paths they don’t remember.
I learned this the hard way. After we rolled out a market-leading procurement suite, I needed to buy something. I was the CFO. I had chosen the system, paid for it and championed it, and I couldn’t figure out how to open a request. If I couldn’t, how would the rest of the company?
So people go around it. They put it on a card. They sign the vendor’s paper. They email the invoice straight to AP, and someone creates a PO after the fact so the invoice can be paid. Each of those lands on the Controller as an invoice with no commitment behind it: no accrual when the work was delivered, coding someone has to guess, and a PO dated after the invoice that documents the spend instead of controlling it. Auditors notice that last one.
Adoption isn’t a change-management problem. It’s a design problem. When the easy way is the compliant way, adoption drives compliance.
2. The record stops at payment
Procure-to-pay does what its name says. It runs from the request to the payment, and once an invoice is approved and staged for payment, whether through Coupa Pay or your ERP’s payment run, the procurement suite’s job is largely done.
The Controller’s job is just getting started. Goods received but not yet billed need accruals. Prepaid contracts need amortization schedules. A 7% price escalator needs to be reflected before it shows up as a variance. The procurement subledger needs to tie to the general ledger. That work happens in the ERP and, in most companies I’ve worked with, in spreadsheets built from exports.
Take a familiar one. Operations raises a $120,000 PO for a consulting project. The work is delivered in September. The invoice arrives in November. Procurement has the PO and the receipt, so from their side everything is in order. But at the September close, the Controller’s team has to find that open PO in a report, decide it was delivered, build the accrual and post the journal entry by hand. The information existed upstream. The work to turn it into accounting didn’t.
That’s the hidden cost: journal entry recreation. The data is captured once in procurement, then re-derived, re-keyed and reconciled again in accounting, every month.
3. The audit trail lives in three places
When the auditors have a question about spend, they don’t ask procurement. They ask the Controller. Why was this invoice paid at this price? Who approved it? Where is the contract? Why was this accrued, and why at that amount?
Answering means stitching together systems with different IDs. The contract sits in a repository or a contract module. The PO and approvals sit in the procurement suite. The invoice and payment sit in AP. The journal entry sits in the ERP. The link between the clause that set the price and the entry that recorded the cost usually lives in someone’s memory, or someone’s spreadsheet.
And in most procure-to-pay setups I’ve seen, the invoice is matched to the PO and the receipt, not to the contract. The contract is a document attached to the record, not a control the match runs against. So when a vendor bills $45.90 a unit against a contract that caps the price at $38, the three-way match can still pass, because the PO was cut at the price on the quote. The overbilling surfaces months later, as a variance the Controller has to explain.
A procurement suite stores the contract. The Controller needs the contract to do work: price the request, check the invoice, draft the accrual.
Four questions to ask before you blame the tool, or the team
If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t your people. It’s that the record ends where your Controller’s job begins. Four questions will tell you what it’s costing you:
- What share of last month’s invoices arrived without a PO, or with a PO dated after the invoice?
- How many accruals were built outside the procurement system, in a spreadsheet?
- For your top 20 vendors, can you show the contract clause that priced each invoice?
- How many hours did the close team spend tying procurement and AP to the general ledger?
What changes when it’s one record
We built Vakari around a simple idea: procurement and the Controller should work from the same record. We call it Procure to Close. The request, the contract, the PO, the invoice, the accrual and the journal entry are one record at different stages, so:
- Employees ask in plain English, and the agent turns it into a complete, compliant request. People use it, so the spend is captured.
- Contract terms become data the day they’re signed, so every invoice is checked against the clause before it’s staged for payment.
- Accruals are drafted from open POs and contract terms, and posted to your ERP once the Controller approves them.
- Every step carries its source, so the audit answer takes a click, not a week.
AI proposes; your team confirms. Your ERP stays the system of record.
Procurement having a system shouldn’t mean finance has more work. Give them the same record, and one deployment means less work for everyone.
— Amir Jafari, Founder & CEO, Vakari.ai
This is one of a monthly series on finance operations and agentic AI. If this describes your stack, see the ways to start, or start with Close: Close Tasks is free. Coupa and Coupa Pay are trademarks of Coupa Software Inc.; Vakari.ai is not affiliated with or endorsed by Coupa. This essay reflects the author’s experience implementing and operating procurement suites, and is not a review of any specific product release.
