Streamline Business Procurement With an AI-Enhanced Purchasing and Payment Solution

In a Nutshell: Once you grow your brick-and-mortar business beyond the embryonic stage, you need to keep your eye on the financial ball at all times. AI-enhanced Order.co helps by centralizing and automating procurement, finding savings among thousands of partner vendors, and meshing the results with a payment platform and virtual credit cards to significantly boost cash flow flexibility. Order.co gets everyone who purchases goods and services on behalf of your company on the same page for better bottom-line results.

Every SMB owner gets to a fork in the road between running the business entirely by themselves or delegating responsibility. The smartest owners look for tools and systems to extend their capabilities without incurring a lot of overhead.

That means looking critically at everything you do and finding a more efficient — and more effective — way for you and your team to do it. If you do that, said Alec Stonitsch, VP of Product, Payments, and Integrations at Order.co, you may find an area of improvement in the way your procurement relates to your expense management.

The reason is you’re probably doing it backward, Stonitsch said, thinking of spend as something to limit after it happens rather than something to tailor in advance to help you achieve your goals.

Spend controls may keep you and your team within budget. But you miss out on the potential savings and efficiencies that guiding the procurement experience with SKU-level granularity can bring.

Don’t think achieving that level of control has to be a time-consuming manual process. Instead of spinning your wheels, Order.co can help you upstream your spend management system from the payment level to the shopping experience.

Customers bring their previous purchase history to the platform to create a customized vendor and product catalog that any employee designated with procurement responsibilities can access. Order.co then guides users through the catalog as a one-stop shop for everything they need to purchase for their location.

Beyond that, AI-enhanced Order.co looks among thousands of vendor and supplier partners for better pricing and product alternatives that save without compromising quality. The payment platform processes transactions into one recurring bill across all vendors to significantly reduce the time needed for accounts payable.

Virtual cards provide a seamless way to transact within the system. And platform partnerships throughout the SMB management ecosystem optimize data leveraging.

“We make sure you can interact and fulfill with all of your vendors, and we have integrations built out to do that,” Stonitsch said. “You guide your purchasing more meaningfully when your approvals sit ahead of your payments.”

The earliest iteration of Order.co created a tech-forward marketplace by connecting smaller buyers to economies of scale. The company had a team of negotiators going out and finding bulk pricing and other opportunities for customers.

Now, that’s all digital, and it starts with the customer itself. The customer’s vendor list and the data they have on their typical recurring purchases form the core of the shopping experience.

“You and anyone you designate gain centralized control over the things you spend money on,” Stonitsch said. “Your managers or end users gain a very simple way to purchase what they need.”

It’s a fit in many verticals where procurement is integral to daily operations. Inroads in fitness, health and wellness, healthcare, hospitality, and retail spearhead Order.co’s outreach to the market at large.

Businesses with multiple locations are a fit because Order.co solves purchasing logistics first and foremost. Any brick-and-mortar business with significant spend — say, $20,000 monthly, regardless of the number of locations — stands to benefit.

“I like to joke that we take a BYOV or bring your own vendor approach,” Stonitsch said. “Customers come onto our platform and effectively create the marketplace in their instance of Order.co that works for them.”

Order.co builds rails where needed to maintain those relationships across the platform transition. That means you don’t end up with a long tail of incompatible vendors or spend as you would with other spend management platforms and marketplaces. Everything is accountable within the system.

Stonitsch uses office pens as a paradigm for the purchasing efficiencies Order.co can bring to SMBs. Not only does the platform help teams limit pen choices to what works given the available resources, but it also finds alternative vendors and other savings opportunities to produce the same but cheaper results.

Furthermore, it’s also prepared to recommend a better pen. In fact, you can even opt into letting Order.co optimize your pen choice and substitute a better option in real time. That way, you ensure you get the results you need.

“Consistency and efficiency are a lot easier when you control the catalog your team shops from,” Stonitsch said.

Evolving this AI-enabled digital marketplace was the first step in Order.co’s corporate journey. The next was to close the loop by providing an integrated payments experience that could leverage the platform’s advantages.

Interestingly, that meant reducing the number of payments a business needed to make. Rather than produce a payment instance for every transaction, Order.co consolidates multiple transactions an SMB makes to its catalog vendors into single recurring payments.

It’s an opt-in process for Order.co customers. With your permission, the platform will fulfill your orders and pay for products and services on your behalf, delivering a consolidated billing experience in return.

“You pay your Order.co bill once a week, once a month — you decide how to set it up,” Stonitsch said. “It can really streamline your accounts payable process.”

Consolidated payments quickly became a core value proposition for how Order.co conveys its value to customers.

Extended payment terms add cash flow flexibility. For Invoices issued weekly, Weekly Net-45 terms provide a due date 45 days after the invoice date. Payment for Monthly Net-60 invoices is due 60 days from the invoice date.

Automated invoice coding eliminates manual data entry errors and boosts invoice processing times through perfectly coded, granular spend data. To speed things up even more, Order.co integrates with the most common accounting systems across its verticals — platforms including QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite.

That allows you to post bills directly into those systems. Order.co provides a UI that allows you to do accounting code mapping so you can get all of your product-level expenses fully pre-coded to all the general ledgers that are relevant to you.

“More than half of our customers leverage that in some capacity, so it’s been pretty popular,” Stonitsch said.

Most recently, innovation at Order.co centers around increasing share of wallet and getting more spend onto customers’ consolidated bills. The result lets you leverage Order.co to make your business better while putting every penny to optimal use.

It’s getting more into financial services to accomplish that. One way is through the concept of a preferred advance, where businesses can leverage customized payment terms for large one-off purchases.

Another is virtual credit cards. You go in, spin up a virtual card, and place that down with a vendor. That gives you another avenue to get spend on the platform — and on your Order.co consolidated bill — that doesn’t fit traditional procurement patterns.

You need to pay your office clearing service weekly, for example. Or maybe you’ve purchased a piece of software or subscribed to a digital service. It doesn’t make sense to segregate those expenses from your others. Thus, Order.co’s foray into cards came through customer requests.

With all these tools in place, putting your spend in a single frame and subjecting it to Order.co’s critical gaze is a rationalizing process of procurement optimization. At the same time, Order.co continues to push the innovation envelope through a partnership with spend management platform.

“Customers connect their Order.co catalogs to their Workday instances, search our catalog within the Workday UI, and build carts directly out to Workday,” Stonitsch said. “You can then leverage the business processes and approvals you have in Workday before outsourcing the order fulfillment out to us again.”

Meanwhile, given that Order.co brings intelligence to everything it does, it’s not surprising that the team has slated AI to take a bigger role in its future offering. Stonitsch said the company plans a pragmatic approach to determine where AI is most effective in customers’ workflow.

In the near term, customers and prospective customers can expect Order.co to add precision to sourcing decision-making, optimize fulfillment, and replenish supplies more efficiently.

“We’re definitely testing how much agency to give folks versus how much should we just do because we know it’s right,” Stonitsch said. “It’s all about finding that balance to move forward.”