Certify Enters Procure-To-Pay Market

Corporate expense management company Certify is stepping into the procure-to-pay arena with the launch of Certify Purchasing, announced Thursday (Jan. 17).

The solution, designed for finance professionals, enables automated procurement-related tasks, including requisitions and supplier payments. The tool integrates with Certify’s existing spend management solutions to allow for spend visibility, the company said, while providing custom configurations to define approval thresholds and escalations.

Certify Purchasing is compatible with desktop and mobile devices, the company noted, adding that the procure-to-pay solution provides two- or three-way invoice matching with purchase orders and package slips.

“We’ve led the market for several years with the usability of our software for travel and expense [T&E], and Purchasing provides us the opportunity to bring the proven business processes and intuitive interface of our T&E products to the wider procure-to-pay function,” said Certify CEO Robert Neveu in a statement. “We want to continue to empower [accounts payable (AP)] teams by giving them the tools they need to automate key processes and enjoy increasingly strategic roles within their organizations.”

Its entrance into the procurement space follows Certify’s September acquisition of Captio, an expense management solution based in Europe. The deal marked Certify’s first takeover outside the U.S., and was described by the company at the time as the “most significant international venture to date.” The acquisition raised Certify’s customer count to more than 10,000 across 90 countries.

Research released at the time from Wax Digital and Sapio Research found that eProcurement adopters are not taking full advantage of digitization in the procure-to-pay field. More than one-third of the 200 U.K. senior procurement professionals surveyed said the biggest gap in benefitting from eProcurement technology is in the area of personal productivity, a finding that analysts said suggests technologies’ intuitiveness and user-friendliness needs some work.

“If the wrong technology choice is made or the conditions for implementation are not carefully planned, organizations may only achieve some of the potential benefits,” said Wax Digital Business Development Director Daniel Ball in a statement in September.

if the wrong technology choice is made or the conditions for implementation are not carefully planned, organizations may only achieve some of the potential benefits.”