Palette, CloudTrade Link Forces For E-Procurement

After five years of collaboration, procurement processing servicer Palette and e-invoice network CloudTrade have made their partnership official in a move to streamline enterprises’ purchase-to-pay activities.

In a Tuesday (June 2) announcement, CloudTrade revealed that Palette is its newest partner and the two will work to promote innovation and development in the digital procurement and invoice space. The tie-up will see CloudTrade’s existing supplier customers now have access to Palette’s automated supplier invoice processing services. The firm offers a suite of purchase-to-pay applications that depend on digital invoice technology, the companies said, and will work to meet the growing demand for paperless procurement strategies.

According to CloudTrade Commercial Director Richard Manson, the new partnership will build upon the company’s existing growth. “This new endeavor with Palette is the latest in a series of partnerships for us and it’s great to see our technology continuously complement and enhance existing services and solutions,” he said, adding that CloudTrade has doubled its revenue every year over the last three years.

The partnership also means that CloudTrade’s services will end Palette’s reliance on Optical Character Recognition, which involves document scanning and data conversion. OCR requires consistent quality control, the firms said, but CloudTrade will now provide a paperless option to bypass the tedious process of scanning and checking paper documents.

The announcement of CloudTrade and Palette’s partnership follows just days after fellow e-invoicing service provider Basware published a white paper exploring the wide variety of needs among governments and businesses looking to adopt digital procurement methods. While the positive effects of the tactic are well-known – cost savings, efficiency, greater transparency and compliance – each holds differentiating weight among different treasury departments. According to Basware, it is a matter of identifying which benefit a government or company needs most in order to most effectively adopt an e-invoicing program.