Procurement and suppliers
Procurement rarely breaks at the purchase order. It breaks a month later, when the invoice does not match what was received, when the same invoice enters twice through two pairs of hands, and when the customs bill arrives after the goods were already sold at the wrong cost. NG One runs the whole chain as one thread — need, approval, order, receipt, invoice, payment — and at every step it knows what counts as evidence for the next one. Comparing the invoice against the order and the receipt is the system's job; what reaches a person is the exception that actually needs a decision.
- Approved purchase orders
- 3-way matching
- Supplier invoice OCR
- Landed costs and customs
- Duplicate detection
- Supplier prepayments
What this space solves
Procurement is where a company spends money against a promise, then verifies it through three documents created at three different moments by three different people.
In most companies that verification runs on human attention, and the books show it. A clerk reads the invoice on screen, the receipt on paper, hunts for the order in an inbox, and guesses whether a two percent price gap is a supplier error or a negotiated rebate nobody recorded. By the two-hundredth invoice of the month, verification has quietly become a signature. Duplicate invoices do not slip through because someone is careless; they slip through because the system has no concept of invoice identity — the same document arriving by email and by post is simply two records.
NG One turns that work into a rule instead of a habit. The purchase order is the origin of the obligation and passes through approval limits that live in the platform, not in a bolt-on. Goods receipt is canonically owned by Inventory and logistics, but it binds to the order line by line and quantity by quantity, not by document number. When the supplier invoice arrives, the system matches it against the order and the receipt at line level, applies the tolerances the company itself defined, and posts what agrees. What does not agree never becomes a silent error — it becomes a task with an owner, an exact variance, and a proposed resolution.
The structural difference is what happens afterwards. The cost of imported goods is not known on the day of receipt: freight, forwarding, and duties land weeks later. Most systems then offer either a manual revaluation or acceptance of a margin that is simply wrong. NG One carries backdated recalculation in the inventory core — a late landed cost is allocated across the customs declaration lines by the chosen key and pushed back through every issue of those goods, with a posting entry that explains each change. The same holds for dimensions: procurement cost carries its cost center, project, and owner from the first line, so a project report is never reconstructed out of account codes.
The procurement flow
Procure-to-Pay — six steps NG One runs as one chain. Each step knows which document triggered it and which document proves it is finished.
- Step 1
Need
A requisition starts where the need actually exists — in the warehouse at a reorder point, in production against a work order's material, in the office against a cost. It carries a reason, not only an item code.
- Requisition with cost center and owner
- Replenishment proposal from reorder points and open orders
- AI draft order from consumption and supplier lead time
- Consolidation of several requisitions to one supplier
- Step 2
Approval
The requisition routes by amount, category, and organizational unit. The chain is configuration, not code: limits, branching, substitutions, and escalations change in the console.
- Multi-step approval with amount limits
- Maker–checker and segregation of duties
- Delegation and substitution during absence, with an audit trail
- SLA timers and escalation when a decision is late
- Step 3
Purchase order
An approved requisition becomes a purchase order to the chosen supplier, priced from the contract or the quote, with a date that enters inventory planning as incoming quantity.
- Purchase order with terms, date, and currency
- Incoming quantity visible in the stock picture
- Sending to the supplier and tracking confirmation
- Amendment and cancellation with a fresh approval round
- Step 4
Receipt
Goods arrive and the receipt is created in Inventory and logistics — its canonical home — but it opens from the purchase order and binds line by line. Shortages, overages, and damage are recorded while the truck is still there.
- Goods receipt from the order, by line and quantity
- Lot, serial number, and expiry captured at receipt
- Partial and multiple deliveries against one order
- Receipt variance against the order raised as an exception
- Step 5
Invoice and matching
The supplier invoice is read, matched against the order and the receipt, and checked for duplication before it becomes a liability. The system posts what agrees and reports what does not.
- OCR with fields the system refuses to guess
- Line-level 3-way matching with tolerances
- Duplicate check by supplier, number, and amount
- Prepayment invoices settled by the final invoice
- Step 6
Payment and trail
The liability falls due, payment is proposed, the statement is reconciled. Cost is completed with landed charges and, when needed, pushed back in time — without manual revaluation.
- Payment proposal by due date and priority
- Statement matched against open supplier items
- Landed costs and customs applied to inventory value
- Backdated recalculation with a posting entry
Capabilities
Thirty named capabilities across five groups — from the supplier master record to backdated cost recalculation. All of it stands on one core: the same workflow, the same dimensions, the same trail.
Suppliers and contracts
Who they are, on what terms, and how reliable they turn out to be.
5 capabilities
Single supplier record
One partner record for the whole system — the same legal entity can be both a customer and a supplier without two lives and two balances. It carries supplier items, their codes, unit-of-measure conversions, and barcodes.
Partner 360 for suppliers
One screen with everything: open orders, receipts, invoices, prepayments, balance, documents, and correspondence on a single timeline — instead of five lists and a guess.
Payment terms and statutory deadlines
Payment terms per supplier and per document, with the Serbian 45/60-day settlement deadlines as a time-versioned system parameter. The due date is computed under the rule that applied on the document's own date — not remembered, and not retyped when the law moves.
Supplier contracts and versioned price lists
Agreed terms, prices, and rebates with validity periods. A price on an order knows which contract version it came from, so an old order does not change when the contract does.
Supplier rating
Scored on delivery timeliness, quantity accuracy, quality, and invoice accuracy — computed from documents that already exist, not from a survey nobody fills in. It reads per supplier, per item, and per period.
From need to purchase order
How a cost originates, who approves it, and under whose signature it reaches the supplier.
6 capabilities
Purchase requisition
Internal request with quantity, required date, cost center, and reason. The entry point of the flow for warehouse, production, and overhead spend.
Purchase order
The document of obligation: lines, prices, terms, date, currency. Open quantity is visible to inventory as incoming stock and feeds planning.
Approval with limits and escalation
Multi-step routing by amount, category, and organizational unit, with delegation, SLA timers, and automatic escalation. The chain is configuration, not a code change.
Maker–checker and segregation of duties
Whoever enters does not approve; whoever approves does not pay. Six-layer authorization (roles, data scope, limits, SoD, maker–checker, delegation) is part of the platform, with an immutable log.
AI purchase proposal
A draft order from consumption, reorder points, open sales orders, and the supplier's lead time. Always a draft with reasoning — a person confirms it.
Requests for quotation, bids, and selection
An enquiry goes to several suppliers at once, bids are compared on price, lead time, and terms on one screen, and the choice carries reasoning that stays attached to the order that comes out of it. Why the more expensive supplier won is written in the document, not in someone's memory.
Receipt, invoice, and matching
Where the promise is compared against the delivery and against the bill. The core of this space.
7 capabilities
Goods receipt from the order
The receipt is canonically owned by Inventory and logistics, but opens from the order and binds line by line — with lot, serial, and expiry. Partial and repeated deliveries against one order are the normal case, not an exception.
Supplier invoice
Lines, VAT treatment, dimensions, and links to the order and the receipt. The posting carries an explanation and a reference to the rule version that produced it.
Supplier invoice OCR
Reads supplier, number, date, amounts, VAT, and lines, with accuracy measured per field type. A field the system is not confident about stays empty and asks for a person — it is not filled with an assumption.
3-way matching with tolerances
Automatic comparison of invoice, order, and receipt at line level. Price and quantity tolerances are set by the company; inside tolerance the system posts on its own, outside it raises a task with the exact variance.
Duplicate invoice detection
Checked before posting against supplier, number, date, amount, and lines — it catches the same invoice arriving twice through two channels with different attachments.
Prepayments and supplier credit notes
Prepayment invoices, usage tracking, and settlement by the final invoice with the correct VAT treatment. Incoming credit notes are bound to the document they correct.
Inbound invoices from SEF
The SEF channel retrieves inbound invoices from the Serbian e-invoicing system, and acceptance or rejection goes back within the statutory window. The original UBL 2.1 document stays attached to the record as evidence, so a posting can always be traced back to what the supplier actually sent.
Import, customs, and inventory value
What goods truly cost once freight, forwarding, and duties are added — and what happens when that bill arrives late.
6 capabilities
Landed costs
Freight, forwarding, insurance, customs, and duties enter inventory value rather than period expense. The origin of every part of the cost stays visible, not just the total.
Customs declaration (JCI)
The customs document with lines, base, duties, and links to the receipt and the supplier invoice. Inventory value is completed from it, not retyped by hand.
Landed cost allocation by key
Allocation by value, weight, volume, or quantity — with the key chosen per cost type, because freight and insurance do not follow the same one.
Backdated cost recalculation
When a cost arrives after the goods were sold, recalculation pushes the value back through every issue of those goods and corrects margins — automatically, with a posting entry and a trail. No manual revaluation, no accepting a wrong margin.
Foreign currency purchasing
Orders, invoices, and payments in foreign currency, with exchange differences computed automatically. The central bank rate table is retrieved on its own and kept time-versioned, so an older document is always restated at the rate that applied on its own date.
Customs regimes, excise, and consignment
Special purchasing regimes: excise goods, purchase from private individuals with VAT compensation, and commission or consignment stock the company does not own.
Payment and the trail in the books
The liability that falls due, the money that leaves, and a posting that can explain itself.
6 capabilities
Open supplier items and ageing
Balance by supplier and by document, with due dates and currency. Seeing what falls due this week does not require an export to a spreadsheet.
Payment proposal
The system proposes what to pay by due date, priority, and available funds, with the local payment reference model. The proposal is a draft — an authorized person releases it.
Statement import and automatic matching
A bank statement file is matched against open items by reference, amount, and partner. What stays unmatched remains visible as a task, not as a difference discovered at month end.
Reconciliation letters, netting, and assignment
Agreeing open items with a supplier and closing obligations without cash movement, each form with its own document and posting.
Dimensional posting of procurement cost
Cost center, project, owner, and organizational unit sit on the line from the first line. A project report is not reconstructed through account sub-analytics — the dimension is already there.
Live bank connectivity
Statements are retrieved and payment orders submitted through per-bank channels. Where a bank offers no channel, the same flow runs through file import and export in the same formats — the transport changes, the document and the posting do not.
What AI does in procurement
None of this decides on a person's behalf. All of it prepares a decision, shows what the preparation rests on, and leaves the confirmation to a human hand.
OCR that admits what it does not know
Accuracy is measured per field type, not as one number for the whole document: invoice number, date, tax ID, base, VAT, and lines each carry their own measured accuracy, because the cost of getting each one wrong is different. A field below the confidence threshold stays empty and flagged — the system refuses to guess. A blank a person fills in five seconds is cheaper than a wrong tax ID discovered in a VAT return.
3-way matching as a rule, not as attention
The invoice is compared against the order and the receipt line by line, not on the total — because two errors in opposite directions cancel out in a sum but never in a line. Price and quantity tolerances are the company's configuration. Inside tolerance NG One posts without asking and reports it on My work; outside it, it opens a task with the exact variance, the three source documents attached, and a proposed resolution.
Duplicates caught before posting
The check does not look at the invoice number alone — the same document often arrives by email and by post with a different attachment and a different line order. NG One compares supplier, number, date, amount, and line content, and flags a duplicate candidate before the liability exists. Next to the flag sits the record already in the system, so the decision is made by comparison rather than by memory.
Purchase proposals as drafts
NG One computes what to order from consumption, reorder points, open sales orders, incoming quantity, and that supplier's real lead time — measured from their own past receipts, not from the agreed date. The result is a draft order with reasoning behind every line. The buyer edits or confirms it; the system never sends it on its own.
A copilot with evidence, on the document
On a supplier invoice, the panel offers concrete actions instead of an empty prompt: explain the posting, check the VAT treatment, find the related goods receipt, check for a duplicate, draft a message to the supplier. Every answer carries its source documents and a drill-down to the data it was derived from — a claim without evidence is not shown. The copilot sees exactly what the user sees: the same roles, the same data scope, the same tenant, and every question lands in the AI audit log.
Why this is different
An honest comparison with what a company already runs — without pretending other systems fail at their job.
Inventory value that survives late customs
Landed costs exist in serious systems. What usually does not exist is what comes after: when forwarding and the customs declaration arrive three weeks late and the goods are already sold, the system offers a manual revaluation or an incorrect margin. NG One carries backdated recalculation in the inventory core — the cost is allocated by key, pushed back through every issue, and margins are corrected, with a posting entry that explains each change.
Dimensions from the first line, not as a retrofit
Dimensional posting is a decision locked into the foundations before the first module, and it cannot be added later without a migration. Procurement cost carries its cost center, project, and owner on the line — not in an account sub-code and not in a description. Cost-per-project reporting therefore does not depend on typing discipline, and the chart of accounts does not grow every time a new site opens.
Measured accuracy instead of a promised percentage
The usual OCR claim is a single number for the whole document. That number hides the fact that the date is easy and the lines are hard, and it says nothing about what happens when the model is unsure. NG One reports accuracy per field type and enforces a rule that a field below the threshold stays empty. Behind it runs an AI evaluation harness in continuous integration — golden sets, per-tenant isolation, and prompt-injection tests.
Approval is the core, not an add-on
The workflow kernel — limits, branching, maker–checker, segregation of duties, delegation, escalation — sits beneath all nine business spaces, and the same mechanism carries the purchase order, the invoice, and the payment order. That is why an approval chain changes in the console without a developer, and why every decision leaves an immutable trail an auditor can read.
The flows this space runs through
A business space is not an island. These processes touch it end to end, and where a flow leaves this space the record stays the same — the next step receives it structured rather than retyped.
Procurement
Procure-to-Pay
The path from a need to a supplier payment. The invoice arrives over SEF, and purchase order, receipt and invoice reconcile themselves — a person decides only where the three documents disagree.
- Requisition
- Approval
- Purchase order
- Goods receipt
- Invoice
- Payment
Questions about this space
Scope, boundaries, and the rules this space posts by.
Why is the goods receipt not in Procurement?
Because every business object in NG One has exactly one canonical place in the navigation. A goods receipt is a warehouse document: it moves stock, carries lot, serial, and expiry, and originates in the warehouse — so it belongs to Inventory and logistics. That does not put it far from procurement: it opens directly from the purchase order, appears in the Procure-to-Pay flow, and is one of the three documents in 3-way matching. The alternative — the same function in two places — produces two versions of the truth and two versions of the access rights.
Does 3-way matching work when goods arrive in several deliveries?
Yes, because matching happens by line and quantity rather than by document. One order can have many receipts, and one invoice can cover receipts from several deliveries or several orders. NG One tracks open quantity per order line and matches invoiced quantity against received quantity, not against ordered quantity. If more is invoiced than was received, the difference becomes an exception with an exact number, no matter how many documents it was spread across.
What happens to inventory cost when customs arrives a month after the goods?
The value is completed and pushed back in time. The customs charge is allocated across the lines by the chosen key — value, weight, volume, or quantity, depending on the cost type — and backdated recalculation runs it through every issue of those goods since the receipt date. Margins on invoices already issued are corrected, and the difference is posted with an entry stating what changed and why. The customer's sales invoice is untouched: what changes is the cost of goods sold, not the price the customer paid.
How accurate is supplier invoice OCR?
We publish accuracy per field type, because a single percentage for the whole document is not usable information: dates and totals are read far more reliably than lines and units of measure, and the cost of an error is not the same. Measurement runs on golden sets in continuous integration, against real invoice layouts from this market. Concrete figures come with the demo, on your own documents — numbers from someone else's sample say nothing about your suppliers. What is guaranteed is the behaviour: a field below the confidence threshold stays empty and asks for a person.
Can we bring over existing suppliers and open purchase orders?
Yes, through the migration framework with templates for partners, items, opening balances, and open documents. Old codes are mapped to new ones and stay visible, so searching by the number people know by heart still works. Migration is first run as a trial, with a reconciliation report and control totals — supplier balances and open quantities are compared before and after, with a rollback path. Cutover does not happen without that report.
Do you support tenders and supplier scoring?
Yes. An enquiry goes to several suppliers at once, bids are compared on price, lead time, and terms on one screen, and the reasoned choice stays attached to the purchase order that comes out of it — why the more expensive supplier won is written in the document, not in someone's memory. Supplier scoring is not collected by survey; it is computed from documents that already exist: on-time delivery from the gap between the agreed date and the actual receipt, quantity accuracy from receipt variances, invoice accuracy from 3-way matching exceptions. So the score never depends on whether anyone found time to fill in a form, and it reads per supplier, per item, and per period.
When can NG One start running our procurement?
As soon as suppliers and items are migrated and the approval chain is configured — and that chain is configuration in the console, not a code change. The order is always the same: migrate master data and open documents with a reconciliation report, set the limits and the 3-way matching tolerances to the values your company already applies informally, then run one invoice cycle in parallel with the existing flow. Go-live happens once supplier balances and open quantities agree before and after. Procurement does not wait on the other spaces either: Procure-to-Pay is a closed chain and runs on its own — and with Inventory and Finance switched on, receipt and posting stop being two separate entries.
Neighbouring spaces
Show us your supplier invoices
The most useful conversation about procurement is not a presentation but a test: bring ten of your own supplier invoices, one import shipment with its customs declaration, and the approval chain you actually run. We will show what the system reads, what it matches on its own, and where it stops and asks for a person.