Economic Intelligence, Built for Business

In collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Coupa is developing the Business Spend Index (BSI) — a new macroeconomic indicator built from Coupa Community data. BSI measures the pace and direction of business spending across cohorts, offering a leading view of economic activity grounded in real purchasing decisions.

Coupa Spend Lab is a research team dedicated to discovering what spend data can reveal about enterprise performance. We transform Coupa community data into intelligence at two critical scales: macroeconomic patterns that illuminate market dynamics, and microscopic insights that validate what drives value for each customer. Our work creates a learning system that improves with every transaction — surfacing insights and ideas that will amplify everything you do.

One of the first opportunities Coupa Spend Lab is tackling with data is the fact that traditional economic indicators were not designed for business leaders.

Where traditional economic tools fall short

By the time most economic figures are published, the period they describe has already passed. Some are faster, but rely on surveys that capture sentiment rather than real behavior. Even when timely and objective data are available, it’s often national or regional aggregates too broad to be actionable.

• Is my sector accelerating or slowing?
• Are my input costs above or below market?
• How does my organization compare to peers facing the same conditions?

These are questions business leaders often have to answer in the face of uncertainty. Real decisions about capacity, inventory, pricing, and investment are often made with poor information because traditional macroeconomic indicators were designed for policymakers, not for executives navigating the real world.

But what if Coupa could build a new economic index specifically for the needs of business leaders?

Putting $8T in spend data to work

Coupa manages over $8 trillion in cumulative transactional volume across our community of more than 10 million buyers and suppliers. Procurement data have many advantages over traditional economic data:

• They capture economic activity at the point where business decisions are being made — earlier in the chain than statistics based on completed transactions.
• Our data reflect what organizations actually did, not how executives say conditions feel, which closes the gap between sentiment and behavior.
• Activity is classified across industries, categories, and geographies, offering the granularity that national aggregates lack.
• With over $4 billion in trade processed per business day on the Coupa platform, the signal is updated with new information in near-real time.

The BSI fuses these data with statistical and machine learning techniques developed with MIT, and domain knowledge from Coupa’s own industry experts.

The result is economic intelligence that speaks to the questions business leaders actually face, at the speed required for decision making.

Research ahead

The BSI is built on an academic foundation, developed in partnership with MIT. The Coupa Spend Lab research agenda is currently working to answer a series of foundational questions:

1. Do Coupa data measure genuine economic activity? Before making claims, we need to validate the signal against recognized external benchmarks and understand where BSI correlates with established indicators and where it diverges.
2. What are the boundaries of reliable inference? Procurement data supports varying levels of granularity. The research must define where coverage is robust enough to support geographic-, industry-, or category-level views, and where gaps remain.
3. Under what conditions do early procurement signals predict subsequent spend? Procurement data contain the causal structure of Requisition > Order > Invoice. How can we understand the statistical relationship between the flow of these documents to better forecast changes in spend behavior?

More coming soon

This work is ongoing. As the research matures, we look forward to sharing what we learn. The MIT collaboration is the beginning of a data exploration framework that will change what’s possible for Coupa and our customers. Look for exciting updates coming soon, including deeper insight into “Coupanomics,” the inaugural BSI report, as well as insight into its research methodology.