Fifty to a thousand people, purchases approved by email and a three-way match done by hand at month end.
Manufacturing, distribution and construction, where quotes live in inboxes and POs are built in Word or Excel.
Small companies where buying happens “however it happens” and nobody sees the total until the bills arrive.
Hundreds of POs a year — enough to need a process, not enough to justify an enterprise procurement suite.
Numbers from procurement benchmarks — the gap between a typical company and the best ones is spend that never went through the process.
is what organisations spend to process a single purchase order — a fourfold spread between the leanest and the rest.
APQC procurement benchmarks ↗more expensive — purchases made outside the agreed process (maverick spend) compared with managed ones.
Ardent Partners, 2025 ↗of spend is under management at typical companies, against 91.7% at best-in-class.
shorter requisition-to-PO cycle at digital-leading procurement teams than at the rest.
The Hackett Group, 2025 ↗contract compliance at typical companies, against 79.5% at the best.
more time spent on analysis rather than manual data gathering at leading procurement teams.
The Hackett Group, 2025 ↗Put your monthly volume into the calculator and see hours and dollars.
Procurement automation replaces the manual path a purchase takes — an email request, a budget check nobody has time for, an approval that waits in someone’s inbox, a PO typed in Word, a confirmation chased by phone, an invoice matched by hand at month end — with a workflow that does the routine steps on its own. In most companies the cost is not the buying itself but the handoffs, and the purchases that skip the process because the process is slow.
We build automated procurement as a workflow around the tools you already use rather than a new platform. Wireclad connects your forms, Slack or Teams, QuickBooks, NetSuite or Business Central and your inbox with n8n and APIs, and adds a language model where documents have to be read: vendor quotes into a comparison table, confirmations into dates, invoices into lines for the three-way match. Every automated purchase order is approved by a person by amount and cost centre, and anything over budget or out of tolerance stops with the reason written out.
The requisition-to-PO cycle drops from days to hours, every purchase is visible against its budget before it is committed, and the three-way match happens when the invoice arrives instead of at the close. Automation in procurement keeps vendor selection, negotiation and exception decisions with your buyers; what it removes is the retyping, the chasing and the spend that nobody saw coming.
The run path of a typical purchase order automation. Each request travels it on its own; anything over budget or out of tolerance stops and goes to a person.
A Google Form, Jotform or Slack form submission starts the run: item, quantity, vendor, cost centre and need-by date.
Reads open POs and the department budget from QuickBooks, NetSuite or Business Central; checks the vendor exists and is approved.
Builds the PO lines, assigns the GL code from past orders for this vendor and attaches any quotes already received.
Under your threshold the manager approves; above it finance joins; out-of-budget requests go to the budget owner with the gap written out.
Slack or Teams card with Approve and Reject buttons; reminds after 24 hours, escalates after 48 and logs who approved what and when.
New items or anything above your RFQ threshold go out to three vendors before the PO is created; everything else moves straight on.
A language model pulls price, lead time and terms from vendor emails and PDFs into one comparison table for the buyer.
Creates the PO in your ERP or QuickBooks, generates the PDF and emails it to the vendor; the PO log is updated.
Reads vendor replies for confirmed dates and quantities; silence after two days triggers a reminder, a changed date raises an alert.
OCR and a language model read the vendor invoice line by line into a strict schema, on any vendor template.
Compares invoice, PO and goods receipt within your price and quantity tolerances.
Clean matches are posted for payment; partial deliveries and price gaps go to the exception queue with the reason attached.
Monthly spend by vendor and category, open POs against budget, and purchases that appeared outside the process.
Typical minutes per purchase order in a small purchasing team. Your own numbers go into the calculator below.
Based on 24 min by hand and 1.5 min with the flow per item, from the table above.
The flow collects, routes, orders and matches. People keep every decision that commits money or picks a vendor.
Large or out-of-budget requests always go to the budget owner, with the gap already written out.
Selection and price negotiation stay with the buyer; the flow only lays the quotes side by side.
Price gaps, partial deliveries and substitutions are decided by a person with the documents attached.
Signing and reviewing contract terms is never automated.
A fast lane exists, but a person opens it and it is logged.
On-time and accuracy figures are reported; the rating is yours.
Flip a switch to hand a step to the flow or take it back.
Benchmarks from The Hackett Group’s Digital World Class Procurement 2025 study and Ardent Partners’ Spend Under Management 2025 report: shorter cycles, more spend under management and more time on analysis instead of data gathering.
We map the process as it runs today, count the minutes and agree what the flow must never do on its own.
A working flow on your real data, in a sandbox. You see every run and every exception.
Edge cases, approvals and alerts, then the switch-over — with the old way kept as a fallback.
Monitoring, fixes when a vendor changes a format, and a monthly report of hours saved.
Yes. For a few hundred POs a year the workflow runs on your own n8n instance around QuickBooks, NetSuite or Business Central, with a form for requests and Slack or Teams for approvals. You get the request-to-PO process and the three-way match without a new system to migrate to.
As rules you can read: under a threshold the manager approves, above it finance joins, out-of-budget requests go to the budget owner. Thresholds, categories and backups live in a sheet you own, and every decision is logged with who approved and when.
Both are connected through their official APIs: budgets and open POs are read from them, POs and bills are written back, and the PDF is attached. Business Central, SAP Business One and spreadsheet-based setups are supported too.
Each invoice line is compared with the PO and the goods receipt within your tolerances. A partial delivery is matched for the quantity received and the rest stays open; a price or quantity gap goes to the exception queue with the three documents attached for a person to decide.
The form is faster than an email, approvals arrive in the chat they already use, and the monthly report lists any invoice that arrived without a PO. Compliance improves because the process is the easiest path, not because the flow blocks anyone.
Extraction goes into a strict schema and is checked by code: totals must add up and the lines must match the PO within tolerance. Anything that does not match waits for a person, and the payment run itself is approved by a human every time.
The workflows run on your server or cloud account with scoped API keys per system, approvals are tied to named Slack or Teams users, and every step is logged for audit. Nothing is stored on a third-party platform you did not choose.
Describe it in two sentences — we reply within a day with a workflow sketch.
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