Procurement
Buy with control. Procurement governs how your company buys — suppliers, requests, sourcing, contracts and match — and every decision lands as a real purchase order or bill in Sales & Finance.
What it is
Procurement answers the questions an accounting system cannot: who is allowed to sell to us, who may buy what, did we get competing prices, and does the bill match what we ordered and received?
It works alongside Sales & Finance. Procurement decides and governs; Finance records. An approved supplier becomes a Finance vendor, an approved award raises draft purchase orders, and a supplier invoice becomes a draft bill. You can license Procurement on its own, but the orders and bills have nowhere to land until Sales & Finance is set up.
Setting it up
Open Procurement Settings and set, in this order: Categories (what you buy, and the documents a supplier in that category must provide), Cost centres (who owns spend), Match tolerances, and the Policy — the spend threshold above which competing quotes are required, the minimum number of bidders, and whether the budget check warns or blocks. Then design your approval chains on the visual canvas under Forge workflow: supplier onboarding, purchase request, bank-detail change, contract, award and change order each have their own.
Suppliers
- Add the supplier and a contact, then Invite. The contact gets a personal link — no account needed — and completes their own profile and uploads their compliance documents.
- Verify each document (they land In review), run sanctions and PEP screening, and submit the supplier for approval.
- On approval a Finance vendor is created automatically. Documents that expire are flagged, and a screening hit suspends an approved supplier until it is cleared.
- Bank details are under change control: a change is a request that goes through approval, and Finance pays against the last approved account.
Purchase requests
Anyone with the initiator permission raises a request. The right-hand panel shows the budget check — the budget, what has been spent, what is already committed to open orders and approved requests, and what is left. Depending on your policy a shortfall is a warning or a block. The request then routes by policy: from the catalog or a contract straight to an order, or to sourcing when it is over your threshold. Requesters follow it through approval, order, receipt and payment on the same screen.
Contracts & catalog
A contract records what a supplier agreed to charge: a rate card, a validity period and, if you set one, a ceiling. Each order placed against it is a call-off that uses up the ceiling, and you are reminded before it needs renewing. The catalog holds pre-priced items from approved suppliers, so an ordinary purchase needs no sourcing at all.
Sourcing
| Type | Use it when | How bids behave |
|---|---|---|
| Request for quotation | You know what you want and price decides. | Sealed — nobody, including you, can read an amount until it closes. Suppliers can change their quote until then. |
| Request for proposal | Quality matters as well as price. | Sealed. After the close you score each bid on your weighted criteria; price is scored from the quoted total and the result is out of 100. |
| Reverse auction | The goods are comparable and you want the best price live. | Not sealed: you watch bids arrive. Each supplier sees their own rank — and the best price only if you chose to show it — and can only improve their own price, by at least the minimum decrement. A bid in the last few minutes extends the close, up to a limit you set. |
Each invited supplier bids from their own link. When it closes you compare side by side, allocate each line to a supplier (so an award can be split), and submit the award for approval. On approval Hubtoll raises one draft purchase order per awarded supplier, priced from the winning bids. An auction needs at least two invited suppliers and takes price alone.
Change orders
An issued purchase order is never edited in place. Raise a change order for the quantities, prices, lines or dates you want to change; on approval it is applied to the order, with a revision history. A change cannot take a line below what has already been received or billed.
Supplier invoices & match
Suppliers send invoices through their portal link. A buyer reviews each one and chooses Accept and raise draft bill, which creates the bill in Finance. When the bill is posted it is checked against the order and the goods received within your tolerances; if it does not match it is held. The Match Exceptions queue shows each held bill with its age and the money in dispute, and a buyer resolves it — accept the variance, adjust, or reject.
Reports
Spend by supplier, category and cost centre; contract versus off-contract spend; cycle times; savings against the first bid; budget against committed and actual; and a performance scorecard for each supplier.
Who can do what
See the Permission reference for the full list. In short: the initiator permission is for everyone who buys anything; the editor is the buyer's role; supplier admin and settings admin are narrower; and workflow editor designs the approval chains. Approving something routed to you needs no permission — the workflow decides who acts.
Procurement sends real email to suppliers (invitations, quote links, invoice links), so test with addresses you control.
Continue reading
Reach the Hubtoll team on WhatsApp or email cloud@digitalvortextech.org. We usually reply within a few hours (Mon–Fri, 8:00–19:00 GMT).