Software
SaaS Procurement Checklist: 24 Questions Before You Sign
Software is now one of the largest controllable spend categories. This checklist covers commercial terms, security, data, and exit before you commit.
Aaron Grainger · 8 min read
Procurement & spend management
Every purchase, approved before it becomes an invoice.
Procura Flow gives finance and operations teams one controlled path from request to purchase order to payment — so commitments are visible at order time, not at month end.
Built for companies of 100–1,000 people with 50–500 active suppliers and a finance team too small to chase approvals by hand. Under 50 suppliers, a spreadsheet is still cheaper.
Approval queue
5 open
| PO | Supplier | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| PO-4821 | Ridgeway PackagingPackaging | $14,200 | Awaiting finance |
| PO-4822 | Halcyon FreightLogistics | $3,480 | Approved |
| PO-4823 | Meridian LabsLab consumables | $26,915 | Awaiting sponsor |
| PO-4824 | Corvus SoftwareSoftware | $9,600 | Approved |
| PO-4825 | Ashfield FacilitiesFacilities | $1,150 | Auto-approved |
Median time to approval this month: 0.9 days
The problem
Spend is decided long before finance sees it
By the time an invoice lands, the commitment was made weeks ago by someone who had no view of the budget. Control has to move upstream.
Commitments arrive as surprises
Budget owners learn what they spent after the quarter closed, because orders and budgets live in different systems.
The same thing bought three ways
Without visible preferred suppliers, teams buy the same category from whoever answers the phone first.
Approvals that nobody trusts
A five-step chain applied to a $200 purchase trains everyone to route around the process entirely.
Platform
Three jobs: ordering, suppliers, approvals
Not a suite. These three are the ones where the control point sits, and everything else we could have built would have made them slower.
01
Purchasing & purchase orders
Requests that take two minutes, purchase orders generated from what was approved, and receipts logged by the person who ordered.
Explore →02
Supplier management
One record per supplier: contacts, terms, verified banking, compliance documents with expiry tracking, and performance history.
Explore →03
Approvals & budget control
Routing by amount, category, and department, with parallel review, standing delegates, and live budget remaining on every request.
Explore →Customer story
“We didn't have a spending problem. We had a visibility problem that looked like a spending problem.”
Priya Raman, VP Finance — Northbay Logistics
Read the full story →9 → 1 day
Median requisition-to-PO time
31% → 8%
Maverick spend rate
$740k
Realised savings in year one
Pricing
Charged per controller, not per purchase order
Requesters and approvers are unlimited on every plan. Charging for them would price you out of inviting the exact people whose spend you are trying to see.
9 → 1 day
Northbay's requisition-to-PO time, first quarter
31% → 8%
Northbay maverick spend, over three quarters
2 weeks
Single entity: one week configuring, one running in parallel
Both percentages come from one published deployment rather than a customer average, and the two-week figure assumes a single accounting entity with cost centres already agreed. Groups consolidating several ledgers should plan for four to six weeks.
Fit
When you should not buy this
Four situations where we lose, and where saying so early saves everyone a procurement cycle.
Your spend is mostly production materials
If purchase quantities come out of an MRP run, buy the purchasing module of your ERP. We sit beside an ERP; we do not replace one.
Under about 50 suppliers and one approver
A shared spreadsheet and a standing rule about who says yes will cost you nothing and work fine. Come back when approvals start stalling.
You need punchout catalogues today
Hosted catalogues and free-text requests, yes. Live punchout sessions into distributor storefronts, no — and not in the next two quarters.
Nobody has agreed the thresholds yet
Software enforces a policy; it cannot write one. If there is no agreement on who approves what, start with the policy template and configure afterwards.
Working out the thresholds first? The one-page procurement policy is the place to start, and the evaluation framework covers what to ask us and every vendor you shortlist.
From the blog
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See Procura Flow on your own purchase orders
A 30-minute walkthrough using your categories, approval thresholds, and supplier list.