Glossary Strategy & implementation

Purchase-to-pay

What is purchase-to-pay?

Purchase-to-pay is the purchasing chain from order to payment: purchase order, receipt, purchase invoice, approval and payment to the supplier.

Also known as P2Ppurchase to payprocure-to-pay

In many organisations this is still surprisingly manual: purchase invoices are retyped, checked against the order and the receipt, and sent past one or more approvers.

AI can read purchase invoices, pre-code them, check them against the purchase order and queue them for approval. Deviations in amount or quantity are flagged before anything is paid.

The sales side is called order-to-cash.

Last updated: 4 October 2026

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