Why procurement automation is really about rules

This change is important because many companies don’t really struggle with a lack of procurement activity. They struggle with a lack of consistency. One team adds suppliers one way, another routes approvals differently, and a third maintains critical exceptions in private messages. When leadership wants better reporting, they realize the problem isn’t the dashboard. The problem is that the underlying rules were never clear enough to produce clean data in the first place. Deloitte’s survey illustrates a similar point more broadly: better business performance depends not just on technology, but on the combination of technology and talent capabilities, and people still need to stay “in the know” if digital investments are to work. This is a useful reminder because it contradicts the idea that software can solve governance issues on its own.

This is where Precoro is worth a closer look. External reporting places the company in a very specific part of the market. In the 2024 Forbes Advisor review of supply chain management software, Precoro was identified as the “Best Solution for Approval Workflows,” with the review highlighting threshold-based approvals, mobile authorization, and strong report customization. The same review also noted limitations: inventory features needed work, and users reported weak invoice integration. On Capterra’s 2025 Procurement Shortlist, Precoro is placed alongside products like Procurify, Tipalti, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, receiving an overall score of 79 out of 100, a review score of 50 out of 50, and starting prices starting at $499 per month. Taken together, these sources suggest that Precoro shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a giant, all-purpose enterprise suite. It is better understood as a platform focused on centralized purchasing control, with its strongest identity based on approvals, structure and workflow discipline.

This positioning is important because procurement automation is often reflected in approval logic. Many companies can live with messy revenue collection for a surprisingly long time. The strain comes when they start to grow, add layers of management, spread expenses across more teams, and require faster decisions without losing control. Precoro’s documentation of the approval workflow is informative here. It doesn’t start with efficiency language. It starts with three steps: decide which rules should affect approvals, configure the steps, and assign owners. It lists departments, projects, locations, and thresholds as common variables and includes line manager approval and over-budget approval as explicit workflow options. That doesn’t prove that Precoro is unique. But it shows that the product is based on a practical approach to procurement: if the rules are unclear, the system will not magically make them clear.

The same pattern is evident in the way the product handles forms and fields. Precoro’s documentation states that companies can create custom forms for purchase orders, requisitions, invoices, expenses, service orders, and suppliers. Fields can be made mandatory, bound to approval logic, and linked through dependencies so that a selection controls what appears next. There is also an important limitation: if a custom document field is involved in approval, it cannot be easily hidden by dependencies. This sounds like a detail that only an implementer would care about, but it says something bigger about the logic of the product. A field is not just a box on a screen. It can determine what information is required, who is responsible for entering it, and whether a document can be shared. In this sense, procurement automation looks less like digitalized administration and more like process rules made visible.

Supplier control tells a similar story. In its July 2024 product updates, Precoro introduced supplier approval dependencies tied to custom supplier fields. In its multi-entity documentation, the company explains that suppliers can be assigned to legal entities, custom field options can depend on legal entities, and tax lists can be automatically filtered based on the legal entity selected in a document. A separate legal entity guide adds that all legal entities within Precoro use the same currencies, processes and approval flows. None of this is intended for headlines. But they’re exactly the kinds of details that matter when a company needs to manage more than one entity, more than one approval level, or more than one tax context. At this point, procurement is no longer just about approving a request. The question arises as to who can buy from whom, under which entity and according to what internal logic.

Even the company’s vacation insurance feature says something about how it approaches workflow. Precoro’s vacation mode allows users to assign backup approvers and backup users so that approvals and document processing continue even during absences. The distinction is important: a substitute approver can approve or reject documents, while a substitute user is responsible for managing documents with statuses such as Matching, Pending, and Under Revision. While it’s a small feature, it reflects an important operational truth. Many workflow systems seem disciplined until a key manager is absent and the queue stops moving. A product that has room for exception handling is often a product shaped by real process friction rather than a neat diagram of the “normal” path.

Here too, Precoro’s boundaries help to define the company more clearly. Forbes Advisor didn’t present it as a comprehensive inventory tool, and Capterra places it in a crowded procurement and spending software market rather than one of the largest enterprise platforms. That’s not necessarily a weakness. For many midsize companies, the bigger problem isn’t replacing an entire supply chain stack. It prevents approvals, supplier settings, enterprise-level controls and reporting inputs from drifting apart as the business becomes increasingly complex. In this context, a platform with a clearer focus may be more useful than one that tries to do everything. External reviews suggest that Precoro’s main strength lies in its approval logic and structured purchasing controls, and the product documentation largely supports this reading.

The broader lesson is that procurement automation is becoming as much a test of management quality as it is of software quality. HBR’s reporting suggests that companies want to act quickly, particularly when it comes to AI. Deloitte’s survey suggests that digital investments pay off best when paired with the skills and decision-making discipline required for proper use. Given this, Precoro is interesting not because it promises a dramatic reinvention of procurement, but because it reflects a more practical reality in the category. The software can route decisions, enforce fields, assign deputies and structure approvals. She cannot decide which rules should apply. That’s still a matter for management. The companies that will benefit most from procurement automation are likely to be the ones that recognize this difference early.

The reason Precoro is worth extensive coverage isn’t just because it’s another tool in a crowded market. The company offers a useful insight into the direction procurement software is heading. The category is moving away from the old promise of “less paperwork” and toward a more practical task: converting internal policies into repeatable behavior across teams, units, and exceptions. External reviewers seem to recognize part of this in Precoro’s approval rating. The company’s own documentation fills in the rest and shows how much of the product is based on rulemaking, dependencies, and continuity of roles and approvals. In this sense, Precoro is less a story about automation replacing judgment and more about software that reveals how much judgment had to be clearly defined from the start.