Coupa Bolsters Controlled Spending, Risk Management Capabilities

Coupa, which works in business spend management, is rolling out new capabilities to help with businesses’ spend visibility while lowering risk, through a cloud-based platform, according to a press release.

The additions, according to the release, will “leverage the power of the customer community and enable businesses to be more resilient during these times and ultimately spend smarter,” Raja Hammoud, the company’s executive vice president of products, said in the release, adding that the innovations are intended to respond to the global uncertainty of the pandemic.

“More than ever, these businesses need real-time visibility into their spend, the ability to mitigate their supply chain risk and cautiously manage their cash flow,” she said in the release. “We’re excited to provide our [business spend management] community with the new capabilities to help them adapt to the current times and spend smarter every day.”

In terms of spend visibility, the new product will allow prescriptions to be ranked according to how they’ll impact the business in full, allowing teams to know exactly how to cut costs in an effective manner. There will be new automated spend controls, barring purchases that exceed the negotiated contract value, letting contracts, invoices and other payments be paused; and there will be better, more accurate shipment tracking for smaller businesses that mirrors that which larger businesses have access to.

According to the release, supply chain risk will be mitigated via new ways of collecting feedback to help alert customers of risk in the chain, as well as enhanced measures of tracking suspicious spending across sourcing, purchasing and payment currency deviations, to name a few. In addition, there will be the ability for customers to start risk assessments directly from the sourcing event process for better streamlining.

In addition, businesses will have the ability to access payment flexibility through new options for early payment discounts, payment authorization authority, batch payments, virtual card payments and more, the release stated, along with unified spend views that will allow companies to add temporary workers and avoid tenure limit disruptions to help protect the businesses.

In April, Coupa acquired business travel app company ETA, which gave it access to the travel sphere.