Procurement Magazine W3 July 2026 | Page 96

Michelle Yip, Senior Director & Product Management, Coupa

Why is it so critical to embed finance and payments directly into a P2P lifecycle rather than treating them as a final, separate step? This is something we ' ve been thinking about for years: how to ensure that we get the full end-to-end from request to order to invoice to payments to treasury capital management, all in one single system. It ' s how you can unlock any hidden cash. If you ' re not able to see your contracts data and your invoicing, you ' re not able to identify any potential discrepancies. If you are able to have everything in one platform, you can feed all of this data into AI, and that ' s how your AI can learn and become smarter.
Everyone talks about having that single source of truth, but that ' s hard to achieve in practice. What ' s the biggest hurdle that companies face when they try to gather all their data into that single location? In our recent Strategic CFO Report, we actually heard that only 5 % of CFOs are able to get their data from one system in order to see everything – all their spend in one place. Otherwise, they ' re struggling with fragmented systems. Companies scale. They might acquire other companies that are on different systems, dealing with multiple ERPs and connected to multiple banks.
What would you say are the tangible benefits that you ' re seeing up close? Are there any recent examples from companies you ' ve worked with where you ' ve seen really impressive results and strong ROI? Having procurement teams who can now also understand the finance team ' s struggles, and vice versa, is one benefit. I ' ve also heard examples where you might have a purchase order that is quoted in a certain unit of measure. For instance, you ' ve purchased cases of certain goods and when the invoice comes in, it is quoted in pounds. So customers always have to do the maths and say,“ Okay, how many units are in a
96 July 2026