Iris Partners With Amazon Business on Procurement for UK Schools

Iris Software Group has launched an integration with Amazon Business that will help schools in the United Kingdom streamline and automate their purchasing process.

This integration will enable 5,254 Iris customers to purchase supplies directly from Amazon Business through Iris Financials, Iris’ cloud-based school finance software, the companies said in a Wednesday (April 24) press release.

“Being able to handle Amazon eProcurement within Iris Financials transforms the time intensive manual processes that are performed daily,” Simon Freeman, managing director for education at IRIS, said in the release.

“It removes the need to re-key information from Amazon into a purchase order, alleviates the usual juggling between applications to copy over information from Amazon to a purchasing system and dramatically reduces the steps needed in gaining approval for purchases,” Freeman added.

This collaboration allows the schools’ purchasing teams to launch the Amazon Business digital catalog within the Iris Financial purchasing system, purchase items and then use the familiar Amazon checkout process, according to the release.

Because it can be fully integrated with an existing Amazon Business account, purchasing teams will benefit from prefilled purchase order lines, automatic generation of purchase orders and approvals and purchase reconciliation, the release said.

This solution joins Iris’ software solutions that consolidate data across multiple systems and automate processes, per the release.

“Through automating admin tasks and offering increased visibility and an easier and improved purchase reconciliation, this partnership will enable schools to focus on what’s important: the education and success of its students,” Fabricio Pedroza, country manager, UK&I at Amazon Business, said in the release.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that chief financial officers across a variety of industries said their organizations are moving to digitize procurement.

Sixty-six percent of retailers, 59% of manufacturers, 45% of finance and insurance companies and 27% of healthcare companies are investing in digital technology to modernize their procurement processes, according to “Digital Payments: Modernizing Procurement Processes,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Corcentric collaboration.

In another recent development, Iris Software Group said in September that it introduced its Iris Outsourcing service for accounting firms in the Americas market.

That service offers a range of solutions that includes bookkeeping, management accounting, payroll processing, financial statements and taxation services.