Coupa’s July’10 release is turbo-charged with enhancements for employees and managers to be in command of their budgets and spend.

Every Requisition Has a Budget Impact

But do you know what it is? Do you keep a running tally in your head, so you know exactly how much budget you’ll have remaining when you approve that next request?

Well, just in case you don’t have that mental tally, Coupa’s July ‘10 release introduces a new capability that brings instant visibility to how every requisition impacts your budget, at the times you need that intelligence the most – before the requisition is submitted, and before you approve it. Users will see, both at checkout and during approval steps, exactly how much budget will be remaining upon final approval of a requisition. And it works on your mobile devices too. Now managers will know how much budget they have remaining if they approve a requisition, even if they are not logged into the system. Check it out:

Roll-Up Budget Reporting Gives Greater Visibility into Spending

Everyone talks about spend visibility, but let’s define it. Management determines the amount of money the company can spend to operate the business, and establishes budgets to manage when, where and how to spend it. With Coupa, budget reports roll up in the hierarchy you define, and can be drilled into for the full detail of every purchase or transaction credited to each and every budget. That means a full audit trail of who submitted the requisition, who approved it, and when the order was placed – all accessed from the budgets you are managing against. Powerful stuff.

Say Goodbye to Approval Bottlenecks

Rather than send an approval notification to a specific person, you can now send to a group of people (an Approval Group). When the group is notified, anyone in the group can approve or reject the requisition. Approval Groups also work with approval chains. You create an approval chain and put the Approval Group as a specific approver in the chain. Perfect for all sorts of scenarios. For example, you may want a legal approval on certain requisitions, but it doesn’t matter which of three legal approvers provide the OK. Or commodity-based ordering, like IT hardware. You may have five or six people in that group who could approve hardware requisitions. Or perhaps you want your executives to be included on any requisition over a certain dollar amount – define an approval group so anyone on the executive team can sign off on qualifying requisitions.

We’re Not Done Yet!

There’s a lot more that’s new and exciting in the July ‘10 release, including:

• Budget Owner Approvals. If you want to make sure that the owner of a particular budget is brought into the approval process, Coupa’s new Budget Owner Approvals feature makes it possible.
• Requester is the Bill-To Contact. This feature is a great example of how Coupa promotes self-service rather than increase burden on your IT department. Say your Payables function is not centralized and hence, in some cases, you want the requester to get the supplier invoice directly. You can now enable that as an option via this new feature.
• Simple Search, Powerful Search. Let’s face it. Search is front and center in our work lives. Its an essential productivity tool for all sorts of applications, and that’s why we put it front and center of your Coupa homepage with the “What do you need?” box. Now you don’t have to rely on exact matches to find your catalog items, policies, web forms and more. Full wildcard searching brings likely results quickly back to your users.

To learn more about these and other enhancements included in Coupa’s July 2010 release, visit the New Features Forum