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.
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