Zip Introduces Intake-to-Pay, the World’s First Unified Platform for Procurement

Increases End-to-End Spend Visibility and Control to Boost Operational Efficiency, Reduce Costs and Mitigate Risk

Zip launched Zip Intake-to-Pay, extending its industry-first Intake-to-Procure platform to now provide sophisticated Procure-to-Pay capabilities, including purchase order (PO) management, accounts payable (AP) automation and global B2B payments functionality. Zip has created the industry’s first unified Intake-to-Pay solution, consolidating all of the tools and processes required for the end-to-end procurement lifecycle. Businesses benefit from comprehensive spend orchestration in a single platform, leading to increased control and visibility over spend, greater AP efficiency and support for compliant purchasing processes.

“The launch of Zip Intake-to-Pay allows businesses to implement a holistic and easy-to-adopt procurement experience that requires no additional training. Zip is the only solution that starts with Intake and solves for the end user’s experience to drive greater adoption across the organization, through to seamless PO management and payments, which leads to improved spend visibility, integrity and control,” said Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip.

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New features announced today:

• Zip PO Management: Teams can create Zip POs from approved requests, manage open Zip purchase orders on their PO dashboard, send POs to vendors via the Zip vendor portal, manage change orders with the right approvals, and sync PO data to the ERP.
• Zip AP Automation: Companies are provided invoice inbox and email sync, vendor portal invoice uploads, multi-language optical character recognition and automated two-way matching. Leveraging Zip’s best-in-class workflow engine, invoices can be dynamically routed for approval based with support for advanced conditions.
• Zip B2B Payments: Businesses can pay domestically via ACH, wire and paper checks and pay globally via wires and local payment rails across more than 40 currencies and 130+ countries. It also provides payment batching and approvals along with multi-subsidiary support and direct debit support for automated funding.

Leveraging Zip’s automated approval workflows, business stakeholders can be easily looped in for bill approvals and acknowledge any goods and services have been received. Once invoices have been reviewed and approved for payment, accounts payable teams can manage vendor payments across subsidiaries and currencies. Businesses can use Zip Intake-to-Pay to decrease purchasing cycle times, minimize time spent in manual procurement operations and redirect employees’ time to more strategic activities. This significantly improves employee adoption for pre-approved spend, which ultimately drives savings. Customizable workflows allow for accurate tracking and matching of POs and invoices, leading to greater internal efficiencies and improved accuracy.

Zaparde explains, “Better spend management truly begins at the point of intake. Legacy procure-to-pay systems are not built to support the distributed purchasing patterns of modern businesses. They are inefficient, difficult to implement and lack dynamic customization. This leads to broken processes, encouraging rogue and non-PO-backed spending that contribute to non-compliance. Intake-to-Pay solves these ubiquitous challenges by unifying the entire spend lifecycle and ensuring adoption across the entire employee base.”

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The First Intake-to-Pay Solution for Modern Procurement Needs

Today, many businesses are forced to use multiple platforms to manage their purchasing processes, which causes disruptions and inhibits their ability to scale, control spend and reduce risk. For example, when procurement and finance or accounting teams use separate systems, it’s difficult for them to collaborate and establish compliant and efficient financial practices. This is validated by the 2023 Trends in B2B Purchasing study, which found that 86.9% of finance and accounting professionals said it would be beneficial if their company could use an all-in-one procurement software solution – from the initial purchase request through payment to third-party vendors.

“Zip Intake-to-Pay extends Zip’s leadership position in the nascent – but rapidly growing – space of procurement applications that are directed at what is becoming known as procurement orchestration,” said Patrick Reymann, research director for procurement and enterprise applications at IDC. “Purpose-built to solve for ease of use, time to value, and stakeholder engagement, the procurement industry is taking notice. Intake-to-Pay is a natural extension of Zip’s dominant position in procurement intake and moves more deeply into the full spend management cycle, applying the Zip methodology to PO management, AP automation and payments. This is a space to watch, and Zip is setting the stage.”

Unlike traditional procure-to-pay solutions, Zip Intake-to-Pay is the first to provide built-in intake capabilities that drive employee adoption and procurement process compliance from a single, unified platform. Zip Intake-to-Pay orchestrates spend from initial request through to spend approval, then to payment processing and payouts. Companies can pay third-party vendors directly for invoices submitted via the Zip platform using email or direct upload.

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Key capabilities of the Zip Intake-to-Pay solution include:

• Create purchase orders: When businesses use Zip, they will create POs from approved spend requests. As with current POs that are synced to ERPs, Zip supports additional flexibility beyond default setups through custom fields. The Zip system is more open than other finance platforms, which eliminates redundant back-and-forth communication between finance teams and the broader business.
• Optical character recognition (OCR): Zip uses an industry-leading invoice parser to extract header and line item information from synced invoices to expertly match to POs, with multi-language support. Through Zip, invoices are issued against purchase orders that are tied to original approvals. This allows for streamlined and highly accurate PO matching that can save businesses significant time.
• Invoice assignment: To more efficiently handle work, Zip supports pre-assigning invoices from an inbox to a particular AP user before they have been coded.
• Bill approvals: Businesses can approve bills for payment based on Zip’s advanced workflow engine. Zip AP Automation has full support for hierarchies, queues and complex conditional logic. Zip users can choose between in-platform comment functionality or use Slack notifications to speed up approval communications. Additionally, users can loop in any stakeholder across the business to approve bills, without requiring an additional license.
• Payment scheduling: Businesses can control their cash flow in Zip with payment scheduling. Once selected, a bill or set of bills can be scheduled for payment with the option to pay immediately, pay by due date or schedule a payment for a custom date. Users can also manage one batch payment process across multiple subsidiaries and currencies, while ensuring the right approvers are looped in to release payment.
• Payout management: A Payouts dashboard shows all payments that have been scheduled and need approval in groupings by subsidiary, currency, and payment date. Payments are organized by payment group by default, and can be expanded inline.
• Reporting and exports: PO, bill and payment data can be extracted from Zip for use in accrual calculation and reconciliation processes. Header and line-level exports are available depending on the reporting need.
• Sync to ERP: Zip provides industry-leading integrations and sync capabilities for ERP solutions like NetSuite. Key fields such as tax codes and amortization schedules are synced into Zip for use during bill coding. When a bill is approved, Zip will automatically sync approvals to a user’s ERP system. Once paid, the transaction record will also be synced.