Procure to pay, sometimes written P2P or procure-to-pay, is the full cycle from somebody deciding they need something to the supplier being paid for it. It is described as one process and it is owned by two departments, and almost every complaint about it is a complaint about the seam between them. Understanding where that seam is tells you which problems are worth solving with software and which are worth solving with a conversation.
The stages, and who owns each one
A requisition is raised by whoever needs the thing. Purchasing approves it and turns it into a purchase order sent to a supplier. The supplier delivers, and somebody records the receipt. The supplier invoices. Payables matches the invoice to the order and the receipt, gets it approved and pays it. Purchasing owns the first half, payables the second, and the goods receipt in the middle is usually owned by neither, which is precisely why it is the step most often missing.
Break one: buying without an order
Somebody buys something and the purchase order is raised afterwards, or never. The invoice then arrives with nothing to match it against, so it has to be approved by a person from scratch, which is the expensive path. Every payables team has a share of invoices like this, and that share is the single biggest determinant of how much of the process can ever run without human attention.
Break two: the receipt nobody records
The order exists and the invoice arrives, but nothing says the goods came. The match cannot complete, so the invoice waits while somebody emails the site to ask whether the delivery arrived three weeks ago. The fix is rarely software: it is making the receipt somebody's explicit job at the point the delivery is signed for, which is a policy decision that a system can then record rather than create.
Questions people ask about procure to pay
What is the difference between procure to pay and purchase to pay?
Nothing meaningful. Both name the same cycle from requisition to payment, and different vendors and textbooks prefer different phrasings. Source to pay is a wider term that adds sourcing and supplier selection at the front.
Is procure to pay the same as accounts payable?
No. Payables is the back half of it. Procure to pay includes the requisition, the approval to buy and the purchase order, all of which happen before payables sees anything.
Do you need a purchase order for every purchase?
Most organisations set a threshold below which an order is not required, because the administration outweighs the control on small spend. What matters is that the threshold is deliberate and known, rather than being whatever people happen to do.