3 Ways Finance Organizations Extend the Value of Their NetSuite ERP with Coupa 

Growing companies reach a point where ERPs alone no longer cut it. They fall short in effectively helping businesses reduce their burn, manage their cash, and increase their returns on investments. This is where Coupa comes in. Coupa is a Business Spend Management (BSM) platform that provides a comprehensive approach for managing all the ways employees spend money — from procurement, invoicing, expenses, and payments — to upstream and downstream processes such as controlling and optimizing spend, more agile financial forecasting, and optimizing working capital.

While your NetSuite ERP system is the financial backbone of your business and it’s great at managing the general ledger, it doesn’t provide user-friendly, comprehensive spend management that results in the financial control and predictability that finance organizations need. In this postmodern ERP era, companies are no longer making either/or decisions between their ERP and Procure-to-Pay (P2P) systems. Instead, modern finance organizations extend their ERP investment with a P2P platform to achieve full financial control and compliance and leverage cash as a competitive weapon.

One of the most common challenges that fast-growth businesses face is keeping up with the proliferation of purchases, suppliers, and invoices that can lead to operational inefficiencies. Symptoms of trouble show up in the piles of paperwork, duplicate payments, and late fees as time ticks by while AP tracks down purchasers, pricing, and receipts, along with the ongoing wait for approvals. Finance and IT teams can be overwhelmed by the massive operational volume of manual and siloed procure-to-pay processes. Slowing down to get things under control is out of the question, but many companies running on NetSuite ERP are learning how to face down these threats and get on top of the scaling juggernaut with Coupa.

Here are 3 ways Coupa Extends the Value of Your NetSuite ERP:

1.  Get Visibility and Control Over Spend 

Finance teams often suffer from gaps in financial controls resulting in limited visibility into corporate spend — from ordering, approvals, and invoice processing to supplier payments. Imagine being able to see every dollar spent within your organization before the spend is committed — giving you the power to make better, more informed decisions on the fly. With Coupa’s seamless data flow and modern spend process controls across your entire organization, that power is yours. By extending your NetSuite ERP with Coupa you can close your books faster, reign in out-of-control spending, find new opportunities to save, and reinvest those savings back into the business. TCI Tire Center saved over $1.4M that they reinvested to fuel growth in their first 12 months with Coupa!

2.  Automate AP End to End 

Accounts Payable (AP) can be particularly vulnerable during rapid growth as teams drown in an ever expanding sea of paper. This can lead to duplicate payments, late fees, and inefficient processes. Coupa’s ability to digitize your AP is out of this world. It not only transforms paper to electronic data but supports process improvements around spend, invoices, and expense reports. This digitization will eliminate lag-time and cumbersome approval processes and you’ll experience immediate gains in efficiency and savings. Coupa helped Allegheny Health Network go 100% paperless.

3.  Quick & Easy to Implement 

Fast-growth companies can’t undertake multi-year IT projects to solve their problems because they are moving too fast. Instead, they need projects that are easy to configure and easy for all users to learn, from employees to suppliers. Software must be intuitive and applications must integrate with other systems. Coupa’s prebuilt NetSuite integration leverages the data already in your ERP and has API SuiteScripts pre-built that can be deployed quickly. Fast-growth businesses deploy Coupa in just weeks, not quarters or years. DoorDash went live with Coupa in just 10 weeks. Lastly, the platform must be secure. Coupa has built-in compliance to shield yourself from risk.