Why Procurement Automation Is Really About Rules

That change matters because many companies do not 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 keeps critical exceptions in private messages. By the time leadership wants better reporting, it discovers that the problem is not the dashboard. The problem is that the underlying rules were never clear enough to produce clean data in the first place. Deloitte’s survey makes a related point in a broader way: better enterprise performance is linked not to technology alone but to the combination of technology and talent capabilities, and humans still need to remain “in the loop” if digital investment is going to work. That is a useful reminder because it cuts against the fantasy that software can settle governance questions on its own.

This is where Precoro becomes worth closer examination. External coverage places the company in a fairly specific part of the market. In Forbes Advisor’s 2024 review of supply chain management software, Precoro was identified as the option “best for approval workflow,” with the review highlighting threshold-based approvals, mobile authorization and strong report customization. The same review also noted limits: inventory features needed work, and users reported weak invoice integration. Capterra’s 2025 procurement shortlist places Precoro alongside products such as Procurify, Tipalti and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, giving it an overall score of 79 out of 100, a ratings score of 50 out of 50 and entry-level pricing from $499 a month. Taken together, those sources suggest that Precoro is not best understood as a giant all-purpose enterprise suite. It is better understood as a platform focused on centralized purchasing control, with its strongest identity sitting around approvals, structure and workflow discipline.

That positioning is important because approval logic is often where procurement automation becomes real. Many companies can live with messy intake for a surprisingly long time. The strain appears when they start growing, add layers of management, spread spending across more teams and need faster decisions without losing control. Precoro’s approval workflow documentation is revealing here. It does not begin with efficiency language. It begins with three steps: decide what rules should affect approvals, configure the steps and assign the people responsible. It lists departments, projects, locations and thresholds as common variables, and it includes direct-manager approval and over-budget approval as explicit workflow options. That does not prove that Precoro is unique. But it does show that the product is built around a practical view of procurement: if the rules are unclear, the system will not magically make them clear.

The same pattern appears in how the product treats forms and fields. Precoro’s documentation says companies can create custom forms for purchase orders, purchase requisitions, invoices, expenses, service orders and suppliers. Fields can be made mandatory, tied to approval logic and linked through dependencies so that one choice controls what appears next. There is also an important restriction: if a custom document field is involved in approval, it cannot simply be hidden through dependencies. That sounds like a detail only an implementer would care about, but it says something larger about the product’s logic. A field is not just a box on a screen. It can determine what information is required, who is accountable for entering it and whether a document can keep moving. In that sense, procurement automation starts to look less like digitized 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 filtered automatically based on the legal entity chosen in a document. A separate legal-entity guide adds that all legal entities inside Precoro use the same currency, processes and approval flows. None of this is made for headline features. But it is exactly the kind of detail that matters once a company has more than one entity, more than one approval layer or more than one tax context to manage. At that point, procurement is no longer just about getting a request approved. It becomes a question of who can buy, from whom, under which entity and according to which internal logic.

Even the company’s vacation coverage feature says something about how it approaches workflow. Precoro’s Vacation Mode lets users assign backup approvers and substitute users so that approvals and document handling continue during absences. The distinction matters: a backup approver can approve or reject documents, while a substitute user is there to manage documents in statuses such as Matching, Pending and In Revision. It is a small feature, but it reflects an important operational truth. Many workflow systems seem disciplined until a key manager is away and the queue stops moving. A product that makes room for exception handling is often a product that has been shaped by real process friction rather than by a neat diagram of the “normal” path.

This is also where the limits of Precoro help define the company more clearly. Forbes Advisor did not present it as a deep inventory tool, and Capterra places it in a crowded market of procurement and spend software rather than among the largest enterprise platforms. That is not necessarily a weakness. For many mid-sized companies, the bigger problem is not replacing an entire supply chain stack. It is stopping approvals, supplier setup, entity-level controls and reporting inputs from drifting apart as the business gets more complex. In that context, a platform with a clearer main focus may be more useful than one that tries to do everything. External reviews suggest that Precoro’s main strength lies in approval logic and structured purchasing control, and the product documentation broadly supports that reading.

The broader lesson is that procurement automation is becoming a test of management quality as much as software quality. HBR’s reporting suggests companies want to move quickly, especially with AI in view. Deloitte’s survey suggests that digital investment pays off best when paired with the skills and decision discipline needed to use it properly. Against that backdrop, Precoro is interesting not because it promises a dramatic reinvention of procurement, but because it reflects a more practical reality in this category. The software can route decisions, enforce fields, assign substitutes and structure approvals. What it cannot do is decide what the rules should be. That still belongs to management. The companies that benefit most from procurement automation are likely to be the ones that understand that difference early.

What makes Precoro worth in-depth coverage, then, is not simply that it is another tool in a crowded market. It is that the company offers a useful lens on where procurement software is heading. The category is moving away from the old promise of “less paperwork” and toward a more practical task: turning internal policy into repeatable behavior across teams, entities and exceptions. External reviewers seem to recognize one part of that in Precoro’s approval strengths. The company’s own documentation fills in the rest by showing how much of the product is built around rule-setting, dependencies and continuity in roles and approvals. Looked at that way, Precoro is less a story about automation replacing judgment than about software exposing how much judgment needed to be defined clearly all along.