By the time you’ve got a shortlist, the hard part looks finished. Four vendors are in and the rest are out. What’s left is a month of demos.
The demos will show you the product. They won’t tell you what the invoice looks like in year three, who does the implementation, or what you’re owed when the system is down for a week.
Below are the criteria in the order a buyer reaches for them. Each one is a question you can put to a vendor before you sign. Every figure links to the document it came from: a filing, a price list, a public spending record. No survey is quoted here, because none of the ones in circulation breaks its numbers out for companies your size.
The gap that starts the search
The trigger is usually arithmetic. Workload in the procurement function goes up every year: more purchase orders, more suppliers, more invoices to match. Headcount and the operating budget go up far more slowly, if at all. The gap between the two is what a finance director sees, and technology spend is the line that gets to close it.
That’s the pitch every vendor on your shortlist is built on. Before you accept it, write the gap down in your own numbers: purchase orders processed last year, invoices matched, suppliers onboarded, and the headcount that did it. A platform is bought to close that gap. If the gap can’t be stated, neither can the return.
Which tier turns on the features you came for
This question goes first because it prices every other one. Precoro is the only vendor on the usual shortlist whose rates we could find published, and its tier list is worth reading even if you never buy it.
Core starts at $499 a month billed annually. Automation starts at $999. Enterprise is quoted on request (Precoro pricing, read 3 September 2026).
Now look at what sits behind each gate. Core covers requisitions, purchase orders, receipts, invoices, two- and three-way matching, approval routing and a contract repository. PunchOuts, supplier onboarding, the supplier portal, intake management, e-invoicing and RFPs start at Automation. ERP and custom integrations are Enterprise only, at a price you have to ask for.
That gate is the whole game. If punchout catalogs, a supplier portal or a live ERP connector are why you went looking, find out which tier carries them. Two tiers above the number you were quoted means you haven’t been comparing vendors.
A supplier portal charges at both ends. Suppliers caught in somebody else’s portal describe the arrangement the same way on every developer forum where it comes up: the customer pays the platform to run its procurement, and the supplier pays the same platform for the right to submit an invoice to that customer.
One complaint isn’t a market, but the mechanism is in the price lists. Ask what a supplier pays to send you an invoice.
What makes the bill grow
Vendors bill for different things, and which thing decides your year-three cost. Coupa’s last annual report before it went private is specific about its model.
Coupa describes its own subscription revenue as “a function of renewal rates, the number of customers, the number of users at each customer, the number of solutions subscribed to by each customer, and the price of our solutions”. That’s the vendor’s revenue line rather than your invoice. Two of those drivers are the ones you sign for: seats and modules. The filing is blunt about what isn’t a driver: “We do not generally charge our customers based on actual usage of our BSM platform” (Coupa Software, Form 10-K filed 16 March 2022).
Doubling the spend that runs through the platform doesn’t double the invoice. Adding 40 occasional approvers does. So does the module somebody wants in month nine.
Ask which roles need a paid seat. Requesters, approvers, view-only finance staff, external suppliers. Then ask the price of one seat added mid-term, when you’ve got no leverage left.
The second invoice
The licence is one contract. The implementation is usually a second one, signed with somebody else. Coupa’s strategy is “to enable the majority of our projects to be led by implementation partners”.
The filing calls it a “co-sell” arrangement. The vendor sells the subscription, and “our partner will sell its implementation services directly to the customer”. Named partners: Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, “as well as boutique and regional consulting firms”.
Nobody quotes that second invoice on a first call. Federal purchasing records are the only place we could find contract amounts on the public record. The US Department of State committed $3,694,100.88 to Ariba Inc for a software renewal running 2014 to 2019. It committed $4,397,323.38 to Accenture Federal Services for professional services on Ariba upgrades over 2013 to 2017 (award IDs SAQMMA14C0208 and SAQMMA13L0188, USAspending.gov).
Those are obligated amounts rather than money out the door, on federal contracts at federal scale. Don’t carry the sums into a 600-person company. Carry the shape: the services line came in above the software line.
The FDA bought Coupa licences for up to 100 concurrent users at $551,152.80 across roughly 23 months (award 75F40125F80186). The award went to a reseller, not to the vendor.
Federal terms again, and the amount doesn’t transfer. The question does. Ask who implements, whether the quote is co-sell, and what the partner’s estimate runs to in days and dollars.
Three years, a year up front
Same filing, same tier of the market. Coupa’s initial contract terms are “typically three years”, and “The large majority of our customers pay annually, one year in advance”. That’s one vendor’s disclosure from 2022. We couldn’t verify the equivalent terms for anyone else on the shortlist, because we found no published terms for the others.
Plan for the shape anyway. Three things belong in the redline: the initial term, the notice period for non-renewal, and the cap on the annual uplift. Get the cap in writing. A vendor who won’t cap the increase has just told you what year four costs.
What a month of downtime pays
Read the service level section before the feature list. Coupa’s remedy is service credits, “typically 10% of the customer’s subscription fees for the month in which the service level was not met”. A month of trouble is worth a tenth of a month’s fee.
On a $1,000-a-month plan, a 10% credit is about $100.
That’s ordinary for SaaS. Ask what the credit is on your contract. Get a written definition of downtime, and check whether the credit is your only remedy. Then price a week without approvals, because that cost lands on your team.
Integration is the risk you inherit
Ask procurement leaders what they’re afraid of and integration with the systems they already run sits in the same short list as supply chain disruption and cyber security. Most of them are living with a partial connection right now: a platform that talks to the ERP for purchase orders and not for receipts, or for one entity and not the other 3. That’s the base rate your project starts from.
Treat a vendor’s integration page as a claim. We looked for a checkable matrix of which platform is certified against which ERP version, and outside vendor marketing there is none.
So make it a reference question. Ask for a named customer on your ERP, on a release close to yours, live for over a year. Then find out who wrote the field mapping.
The AI line
Every vendor on your list will demo something with AI in the name. Ask the vendor for a customer of your size who will state the saving in hours or headcount, and for the period it was measured over. If the answer is a percentage from a slide, treat the feature as unpriced.
So price the roadmap at zero. Buy the platform on what it does in the release you get. If a feature is doing the selling, ask which version ships it and what the contract says when the date slips.
Everything is optimal and everything needs fixing
Here’s the internal argument you’re about to have. The people who run procurement will tell you it already runs at an optimal level. The same people, asked a different way, will tell you there’s still room to optimise. Both are true at once, and that’s why the criteria go on paper before the demos start.
The barrier that beats every platform is organisational: departments that buy their own way and won’t be routed through a system, and priorities that compete for the same quarter. No platform removes it.
There’s also the part that never reaches the requirements document. Nobody has to defend hiring the biggest vendor on the list. Everybody has to defend the smaller one, and the defence has to be written down before the contract is signed, because a year later nobody remembers why.
We have no data on who signs these contracts or how the committee gets built. The written criteria list is what you defend a year later.
The list to send before you sign
One email to all four vendors. The answers come back in writing, which is the point.
- Which tier turns on punchout, the supplier portal and the ERP connector, and what it costs.
- Which roles need a paid seat, and the price of one seat added mid-term.
- Who implements, whether the quote is co-sell, and the partner’s estimate in days and dollars.
- The initial term, the notice period, and the cap on the annual uplift.
- The SLA credit, what counts as downtime, and whether it’s the only remedy.
- A named reference on our ERP, on our release, live over a year.
- What our suppliers pay to invoice us through the portal.
Some of what belongs on this list is missing, because we could not find a primary source for it. There’s no verifiable implementation timeline: the only first-hand figure we found is Coupa’s own “a few weeks to several months” in the 10-K, and every crisper number in the search results traces back to a vendor blog. We found no published failure rate for procurement software either, so anyone quoting one at you is quoting a feeling.
That’s the standard we write to. A number goes in with the document it came from, or it stays out. What that costs and what it covers is on the blog article page.