Purchasing left the inbox

The client is a diversified enterprise group with operating companies in contracting, facilities services and industrial trading. Each company bought what it needed the way it always had. A requisition was an email. An approval was a reply, a hallway conversation, or a message on a phone. The purchase order was a spreadsheet template exported to PDF and sent to whichever supplier the buyer knew. Finance found out about the spend when the invoice arrived.

That approach held while the group was small enough for everyone to know everyone. It stopped holding as the operating companies grew apart. Nobody could answer basic questions: what has been ordered this month, against which budget, approved by whom. Each entity kept its own vendor list, so the same supplier existed in several ledgers under slightly different names. Invoices landed for goods nobody could confirm had been delivered, and accounts payable paid on trust or spent days chasing site staff. Month-end close waited on manual reconciliation, and every audit cycle surfaced the same finding: purchase commitments lived in inboxes, and the ERP only saw the transaction at the very end.

The group engaged Kentro to put the full purchasing cycle on one platform, Kentro's own Procure-to-Pay product: requisition, approval, purchase order, goods receipt, invoice matching and supplier onboarding, with the finance ERP kept as the system of account behind it.

By the time Kentro was engaged, purchasing was not a process. It was a set of habits that varied by operating company and by person, and none of them left a usable record.

• Purchasing ran on email and spreadsheets.: Requisitions, approvals and purchase orders existed as attachments and reply chains. There was no single record of what the group had committed to buy, so the answer to any procurement question was a search through someone's mailbox.
• Invoices could not be verified against deliveries.: Goods receipt was informal, a signature on a delivery note that stayed at the site. Accounts payable had no reliable way to match an invoice to a confirmed delivery, so payment decisions depended on chasing people rather than checking a record.
• The supplier base was fragmented and unmanaged.: Each entity onboarded vendors its own way, with trade licences, VAT registrations and bank letters scattered across shared drives. Duplicate and stale supplier records accumulated in every ledger, and nobody owned cleaning them up.
• Finance saw spend only after it happened.: Commitments were invisible until an invoice reached accounts payable, so budget checks happened after the money was already owed. Group-level spend analysis meant rebuilding the picture by hand from exports.

Kentro deployed its Procure-to-Pay platform as the purchasing layer for the whole group, in front of the finance ERP rather than instead of it. The platform is multi-entity by design: each operating company runs its own approval matrix, supplier relationships and budgets, while group finance sees consolidated commitments and spend. Master data flows in from the ERP, and matched, approved invoices flow back out ready for payment.

• Requisition-to-order workflow built on the delegation-of-authority matrix.: Requisitions route by entity, spend category and value band, configured directly from the group's delegation-of-authority policy. Approvals happen in the platform, including on mobile, and every decision is logged. Approved requisitions convert to purchase orders without re-keying.
• Self-service supplier onboarding portal.: Suppliers register themselves and upload trade licence, tax registration and bank details into a structured review workflow. The portal checks new registrations against existing records to stop duplicates at the door, and approved vendors sync into the ERP supplier master. Document expiry is tracked so lapsed licences and registrations get flagged for renewal.
• Goods receipt and three-way matching with exception queues.: Site and warehouse staff confirm deliveries against the purchase order on mobile at the point of receipt. The platform matches purchase order, goods receipt and supplier invoice within configured tolerances. Clean matches proceed automatically; mismatches route to an exception queue with the full document trail attached, instead of an email thread.
• ERP integration, not replacement.: API-based integration keeps the ERP as the system of account: supplier master, chart of accounts, cost centres and projects flow into the platform, and matched invoices post back as payment-ready vouchers. Single sign-on runs through Microsoft Entra ID, with role-based access mapped to the group's segregation-of-duties rules.
• Structured spend data and e-invoicing readiness.: Every transaction carries entity, category, cost centre and project coding from the moment of requisition, so spend can be read by supplier, category or company directly from live data. Invoice data is captured in structured form aligned with the UAE FTA e-invoicing programme and the Peppol PINT AE format, so the group's supplier invoicing is positioned for the mandate rather than retrofitted later.

The outcomes are operational. They show up in what teams stopped doing by hand and in what became answerable for the first time.

• Purchasing has a single system of record.: Requisitions, approvals, orders, receipts and invoices live in one place with a full audit trail. Audit requests are answered from the platform instead of reconstructed from mailboxes.
• Accounts payable stopped matching invoices manually.: Clean matches flow straight through to posting, and the team works only the exception queue. Month-end close no longer waits on chasing delivery confirmations across sites.
• Finance sees commitments before the spend, not after.: Budgets are checked at requisition time, and group finance watches committed and actual spend by entity, category and supplier as it happens. Spend conversations now start from shared live data instead of competing spreadsheets.
• Supplier onboarding became a governed process.: Every operating company brings vendors in through the same documented path, duplicate records stopped multiplying, and expired compliance documents surface on their own instead of during an audit.