Coupa Launches Major Release with New Smarter Contracts and Accounts Payable Capabilities

Most Popular Cloud-based Spend Optimization Solution Enhanced with Platform and Mobility Updates

SAN MATEO, Calif. – August 28, 2012 – Coupa Software, the fastest-growing provider of cloud-based spend optimization software, today announced the launch of Coupa Release 8, which includes major enhancements to the Coupa platform, mobility enhancements and two new core capabilities: Coupa Smarter Contracts and Coupa Invoicing. These updates give customers further insight into their overall spend, so they can reduce costs and directly impact the bottom line.

“Our relentless customer focus means that we’re continually innovating and enhancing our platform to bring efficiency and savings to organizations and their finance departments,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa. “Since the majority of our customers are those at the front lines – managing accounts payable, responsible for procurement and working with procurement-related contracts – we took their feedback earnestly and developed Coupa Release 8 to deliver on their needs.”

“The market adoption of Coupa’s e-procurement and expenses solution has been impressive,” according to Constantine Limberakis, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group. “By extending into accounts payable and contract management, Coupa Release 8 demonstrates a validation of their commitment to spend optimization. This should be considered a big win for Coupa customers looking to address ongoing pain points in these areas.”

The first new capability, Coupa Smarter Contracts, helps customers realize savings from negotiated volume, find out how much they’re spending against a contract and ensure their spend is within their budget. It enforces negotiated prices at the time of requisition, automatically tracks spend and savings, and alerts customers to critical commitment timelines. It was organically developed on the Coupa platform and is thus fully pre-integrated with the rest of the Coupa suite.

The second capability, Coupa Invoicing, supports customers who want to eliminate paper invoices completely, avoid late payments due to errors or loss of service and improve operational efficiency. It effectively manages invoicing through supplier self-service and smart approval workflows. It too was organically developed on the Coupa platform and is thus fully pre-integrated with the rest of the Coupa suite.

Additionally, Coupa Release 8 comprises significant enhancements to mobility and expense management features, including the ability to create expenses on the road and import itineraries from the well-known, mobile travel organizer, TripIt®, directly into Coupa, which significantly decreases the amount of time spent on expensing and approving travel.

“Coupa has helped us streamline our processes and reduce our spend,” said Kristen Lampert, Corporate Services Manager of Ziegler. “Being an investment bank means we watch our own finances very closely. In addition to the new capabilities, Coupa Release 8 allows us to use the same renowned Coupa usability to improve efficiencies across finance including e-procurement, invoicing and contracts.”

“As a global leader in the sporting goods industry with over 170 different subsidiaries, reducing our spend is always top of mind,” said Christian Bader, Head of IT Latin America, Adidas Group. “Coupa has already done a tremendous job of helping us drive costs down and efficiencies across the board including procurement and accounts payable. The new Coupa Release 8 lets us take that even further with its host of advanced features for invoicing, contracts and the new mobility features.” 

Coupa customers requiring additional value-add services will continue to benefit from Coupa’s strong partnership with its strategic partners including IBM/Emptoris, Bravo Solution, and Scan One among others. 

Key capabilities of Coupa 8 are as follows: 

Coupa Smarter Contracts

The current Coupa platform already supports centralization of purchasing contracts including capabilities of a single repository with secured access with advanced search and reporting. Highlights of the new release include:

• Tiered pricing with discounts based on quantity per order and per contract
• Reduced volume pricing calculations in shopping cart
• Minimum spend commitment and expiry alerts
• Spend charts plotting purchase order, invoice spend and total savings over contract lifetime together with visual overlay of time and spend-based alert events
• Drill-down into all purchase orders and invoices made against the contract
• Summary dashboards of top spend items and spend by commodity 

Coupa Invoicing

The current Coupa platform already supports invoicing process management addressing electronic capture of invoices through supplier self- service portal, and automated B2B connections through CXML, EDI and APIs, sophisticated approval workflows for invoice processing and exception management, workload management through workload distribution and advanced invoice reporting. Highlights of the new release include:

• Support for multiple remit-to locations
• Enhanced support for re-routing of disputed invoices for approvals
• Enhanced invoice tolerance workflows
• Additional approval rules driven by invoice types, invoice tolerance failure type and hierarchies
• Automatic reminders and escalations
• Support for non-PO / Non contract backed invoices into CSN (Coupa Supplier Network) 

Mobility and Expense Management

• Create an expense report directly from a mobile phone
• TripIt Integration (e.g., creation of expense report, importing trips information directly from Tripit)
• Expense auto-classification engine 

Platform Enhancements

Over 30 additional enhancements in the Procure to Order platform, including: 

• Auto-classification (picking the right commodity based on a requisition line description)
• Benchmarking data to drive approvals and escalations
• Integration enhancements – new API for approvals, invoice creation and image scan, lookup support etc.
• Usability enhancements across the board
• Hard stop on budget when limits are reached
• Purchase order change order

About Coupa Software
Founded in 2006, Coupa Software is the fastest-growing provider of cloud-based spend optimization software. More than 250 customers in 40 countries use Coupa purchasing and procurement software to amplify their spend power and reduce spending costs up to 11 percent. Only Coupa provides a true cloud procurement application that enables customers to launch the solution rapidly and quickly realize significant savings. Learn more at: coupa.com or call 650.931.3200. Read more on the Coupa Blog, or follow @Coupa on Twitter.