4 Best purchase order software for QuickBooks in 2023 [In Depth Review]

Today there are 229 vendors in the purchase order software category. Figuring out what solution works best with QuickBooks is a time a consuming task.

Fortunately, there are several excellent purchase order software solutions that integrate seamlessly with QuickBooks and provide powerful features to help streamline your purchasing process.

We spent 20+ hours comparing the different purchase order software options to find the 4 best you can use to manage your purchase order process.

In this article, we will discuss some of the best purchase order management software for QuickBooks and how they can help you manage your purchasing operations more efficiently.

What is the Best Purchase Order Software for QuickBooks?

1.  ProcureDesk – Best of the best

2. QuickBooks – Best for small companies that don’t need an approval process.

3. Procurify – Best for medium-sized companies.

4. Kissflow – Best for companies that need a generic workflow tool.

1. ProcureDesk

Our Verdict – Best of the Best

Price: Starts at $380/month for 10 users

ProcureDesk is a powerful cloud-based solution that provides an integrated purchasing and invoicing solution that works with QuickBooks.

The Best Part:

ProcureDesk provides a flexible workflow engine and support for punchout catalogs that enable seamless purchasing for your employees.

The Worst Part:

ProcureDesk doesn’t offer a payment solution. So if you are looking for a complete Procure to Pay solution with inbuilt payments, ProcureDesk is not your solution.

Get it if you want an easy-to-use purchase order solution without the inbuilt payment solution.

I recommend scheduling a demo to see if ProcureDesk is a good fit for you

Best For

Best For Companies looking for a robust solution that integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Enterprise.

Key features

Purchase requisitions

With purchase requisitions, you can provide an easy way for your employees to request products or services they need to support the business.

You can configure ProcureDesk to capture all information required for management to review and approve the purchase request.

Here is an example of a purchase requisition screen:

Vendor catalogs

There is no point in implementing a purchase order software, and still, have your employees enter the description and details about what they want to purchase.

You just moved them to a pretty purchase requisition form, but that doesn’t decrease the time it takes to create a purchase requisition.

With catalogs, you can significantly reduce the time spent creating purchase requisitions.

It also reduces errors in the purchase requisition and avoids back and forth on the purchase orders.

With punch-outs, you can directly link the requisition process to the vendor punch-out enabling faster requisition processing.

Purchase Approvals

With a flexible workflow engine, you can route your request for approval to the right stakeholders.

The flexible workflow engine supports approvals based on departments, dollar amounts, budget owners, etc. This streamlines and automates your purchase approval workflow.

Purchase orders

Digital purchase order functionality completely automates the purchase order creation and dispatch process. The system automatically assigns a purchase order number, or you can set up custom PO numbers. There are multiple templates to choose so you can fully customize the look and feel of the purchase order, including the company logo.

ProcureDesk can send the purchase order in the format that works for your suppliers.

For example, email the purchase order to the supplier or send the purchase order electronically via cXMl or EDI.

Example of a purchase order:

Order tracking

After placing the order with the vendor, you want to track the orders and mark them received when the vendor delivers the product.

With ProcureDesk order tracking, you can track the purchase order lifecycle. We have inbuilt order tracking to allow you to track your orders across multiple carriers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, and so on.

Budgets

With budgets, you can approve with confidence!

You don’t have to worry about going over budget or whether you have the budget in the first place. With ProcureDesk, the budget management capability is fully baked into your procurement process.

With budget tracking, the system automatically shows you budget consumption to track your spending effectively. With built-in budget controls, you can enable budget checks when creating a purchase requisition or purchase order.

Reporting

Track your spending and cash flow with inbuilt reports and dashboards. With Dashboard, you get a single view of spending across multiple companies.

Whether you want to track spending by the supplier or department, Dashboards provide easy access to your Spend data without running reports in your accounting system.

Invoicing

With the vendor invoice module, you don’t have to worry about uploading invoices into the system, matching them with purchase orders and receipts, and following up with different stakeholders for approvals.

With Invoicing:

1. The system can import supplier invoices from different sources.
2. Match the invoices with the purchase orders.
3. Identify any discrepancies and inform stakeholders about what they need to do.

OCR

With OCR (Optical Character Reader), the system can read the invoice document and automatically create the invoice.

You don’t have to worry about copy-pasting the data from the invoice into the system, and with automated matching, it can quickly identify the invoice lines on the Bill.

Supplier portal

The supplier portal provides a self-service mechanism for the suppliers to submit their invoices against a specific purchase order.

It makes it easy for suppliers to submit invoices and makes it easy for them to track the status of their payments.

You benefit from not entering the supplier invoices, and suppliers get better visibility.

Expense management

With expense management, you can reduce the time spent on entering and processing expense reports.

With expense management:

1. The system automatically creates the expenses by downloading transactions from the credit card provider.
2. Users can easily take pictures from their mobile phones and attach receipts.
3. Managers can quickly review the expense before the Accounts payable team processes it.

Inventory management

Inventory management helps you track the inventory of consumables and other products.

With inventory management:

1. You can manage all the inventory in one single place.
2. You can easily track where the inventory is used and associate it with different projects.
3. Avoid inventory stock-outs by tracking on-hand levels and reorder levels.

Pricing

ProcureDesk offers three pricing plans:

 

1. The purchase order module starts at $380 and covers 10 users.
2. The base plan covers all the core features for purchasing automation, including requisition, purchase orders, receipts, and order tracking while leveraging purchasing automation.
3. Annual subscriptions provide a 20% discount on all plans. All plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Schedule a demo and see how ProcureDesk can help you streamline purchasing.

2. QuickBooks

Our Verdict – Best for companies starting with the purchase order process and not needing approvals.

Price: Starts at $30/month

QuickBooks provides a complete accounting package for small companies.QuickBooks purchase order software helps businesses streamline their purchasing process. The purchase order software allows users to create and track orders, view supplier information and set up automated reminders for payment due dates.

The Best Part:

QuickBooks provides a simple interface for purchase order creation. It provides an out-of-the-box purchase order document template that you can use for issuing purchase orders to vendors.

The Worst Part:

There is no approval workflow for routing the request for the purchase for approvals. The approvals need to be managed outside the QuickBooks purchase order process.

Best For

QuickBooks is ideal for companies starting with the purchase order process and not needing approvals.

Key Features

As mentioned above, if you are a small operation and create less than ten purchase orders a month, you probably don’t need purchase order software.

You very well can use QuickBooks capabilities to create and generate purchase orders.

QuickBooks Online and Enterprise have reasonably good capabilities for creating a purchase order. The same is true for QuickBooks Desktop.

You can create a purchase order from the item list (if you maintain one), or you can enter the description of what you are purchasing.

1. Create a purchase order

Here is an example of a QuickBooks Online purchase order screen:

There is no purchase order approval workflow in QuickBooks, but with a low volume, the purchase approvals can be managed outside the QuickBooks system.

2. Convert a purchase order into a Bill

Supplier invoices are called Bills in QuickBooks, while we might refer to them as supplier invoices.

You can convert a purchase order into a Bill or create a Bill without a purchase order with the built-in capabilities.

Here is an example of a bill or vendor invoice in QuickBooks Online:

The challenge with QuickBooks is that it has a limited set of controls.

For example, if you want to allow access to Purchase order functionality, that is impossible.

Controllers don’t want to risk someone messing up with a chart of accounts. They also don’t want costs booked to the wrong account.

If you have a small operation, here is what we recommend.

1. You can set up a manual requisition process for employees to create requisitions.
2. You also need a process for the purchase requisition approval.
3. After the purchase requisition is approved, have a purchase order document issued from QuickBooks.
4. Have a single person responsible for entering the purchase order so that you don’t have control issues.

The manual process can be effective if you deal with a low purchase order volume.

Here are some areas where the above solution is not going to work.

1. You need better purchasing controls for compliance.
2. You are creating 10+ purchase orders every month. As the volume increase, it isn’t easy to scale the manual process.
3. You want to make it easy for users to create requisitions but not to clutter the item master in QuickBooks with non-inventory items.
4. You want to have custom fields on the purchase order document.
5. You want the functionality to match invoices with purchase orders automatically.

Stop spending hours approving, creating and tracking purchase orders. Click here to schedule a demo with one of product specialist and see a better way to manage your purchasing.

Pricing

Here is an overview of the different packages:

1. QuickBooks offers affordable packages starting at $30/month for a single user.
2. The base plan covers the expenses and purchase orders module. If you need Bills, then you need to upgrade to the next plan.

3. Procurify

Our Verdict – Best for companies needing a generic purchase order process without strong support for punchout catalogs.

Price: Procurify doesn’t list prices on its website. You have to reach out to the vendor to get a quote.

Procurify offers end-to-end Spend management software with purchasing and invoicing capabilities. Procurify claims its software to be intuitive and straightforward. With Procurify, businesses can easily create and track purchase orders, manage supplier relationships, and ensure compliance with company policies

The Best Part:

Procurify offers an end to end Spend management tool, which includes payment using virtual cards.

The Worst Part:

There is limited support for punchout catalogs. It is missing extensive coverage of punchout suppliers.

Best For

The tool is best for medium-sized companies that are looking for robust generic purpose purchase order software to automate the purchasing process.

Key Features

1. Purchase requisition: Forms to capture and keep track of purchase requests
2. Purchase approvals: Ability to route the approvals
3. Purchase orders: Issue PO’s and generate orders automatically
4. Reporting: for reporting on spending data
5. Vendor management: for tracking supplier data
6. Invoicing: Invoice approvals and three-way matching
7. Expense management: for expense reporting and tracking
8. Budget management: real-time budget tracking.

Pricing

Procurify does not list its pricing on its website. However, there are different plans to choose from:

Here is an overview of different pricing packages:

4. Kissflow

Our Verdict – Best for companies looking for a single tool for automating all their workflows, including the purchase order process.

Price: Starts at $1990/month

Kissflow offers a simple, optimal, and efficient platform to manage and track all of your work

Kissflow is a digital platform that has many solutions. Their Procurement product is part of the digital platform.

The Best Part:

Kissflow is known for there no code, low code platform that can be customized for any business process. If you are looking a fully customizable solution then this is the best option for you.

The Worst Part:

Even though the tool offers flexibility, it needs to be supported by someone in your organization. So consider the additional resource requirements to manage the tool. There is limited support for punchouts, so that makes the purchasing process very manual.

Best For

If you are looking for a generic purpose workflow tool that can not only support procurement but any other business process, then Kissflow is the best choice for you.

Key Features

Here are the key features regarding purchase order and invoicing capabilities

1. Purchase requisition: Forms to capture and keep track of purchase requests
2. Purchase approvals: Ability to route the approvals
3. Purchase orders: Issue PO’s and generate orders automatically
4. Reporting: for reporting on purchasing data
5. Vendor management: for tracking supplier data
6. Invoicing: Invoice approvals and 3 way matching

Pricing

Kissflow starters at $1,990/month are billed annually.

Kissflow doesn’t break the cost down by features or users.

Purchasing Order Software that works With Quickbooks

A key part of the requirements is that any purchase order or invoicing system syncs transactions and master data with QuickBooks.You should be able to quickly authorize the connection with your QuickBooks account.This is important for two reasons:

1. You save time by not performing redundant data entry in QuickBooks. A purchase order system that integrates with QuickBooks automatically takes care of that for you.
2. You avoid any errors related to data entry from one system to another system.

We recommend that the purchase order software system should supports the following:

Master Data Sync:

With QuickBooks, you can sync the master data to use in the transactions. We recommend using the following master data sync from QuickBooks

1. Item master: You can import your item master data into QuickBooks and purchase the items.
2. Suppliers: You don’t have to recreate the data in the purchase order system.
3. Projects: so that you can allocate costs to the correct projects.
4. Class: so that you can correctly categorize your expenses.
5. Chart of accounts: so that the accountants can book the cost to the correct accounts.
6. Payment terms: so that you can pay your vendors on time.

Transactions Sync:

The transaction sync allows you to send the transaction data back to QuickBooks.

This includes the following

1. Sync purchase order to QuickBooks.
2. Sync receipts for the purchase orders.
3. Sync Invoices/Bills to QuickBooks so that the order can be closed.
4. Sync supplier information with QuickBooks as it changes in the purchase order system

The transaction sync should be event-based so that as and when a document is created and approved in the purchase order system, it automatically sends it to the QuickBooks system.

This saves time and an extra step to sync the transaction data with the accounting system.

What are the key Features For Purchase Order Software?

We tend not to give generic advice on the best purchase order software for you. The reason is that it depends upon your objectives.

So here are some key features for each category of purchase order automation solutions so that you can decide what works best for you.

Purchase Requisitions

A purchase requisition is the core functionality of purchase order software. With purchase requisition automation, you can eliminate your employees’ manual purchase requisition process.

The key here is not to just replace the paper form with an electronic one because no one likes to fill out forms!

Instead, use this as an opportunity to simplify the purchase requisition process. Here are some ideas

1. Eliminate data entry by use of catalogs
2. Reduce the back and forth with finance regarding chart of accounts usage using system defaults based on the user department and purchase requirements.

Approvals

To better control your spending, you need a purchase approval process.

This gives management the ability to control spending and manage budgets effectively.

Here are two things to keep in mind:

1. You need a system that is flexible enough to meet your approval requirements.
2. With that said, you don’t need to review every small-dollar purchase.

Use approvals as a mechanism to set up accountability for your middle management tier.

Create And Manage Purchase Orders

Once the requisition is approved, you can convert that into a purchase order and send it to the vendor.

With the purchase orders functionality, you should be able to:

1. Convert a requisition into a purchase order and automatically dispatch the PO to the supplier.
2. You should be able to track the lifecycle of the purchase order. I.e., order acknowledgment, tracking, delivery receipt, etc.

Catalogs

You can make a repeat purchase a breeze with catalogs for your employees. You can connect with the vendor website or build your catalog to improve purchasing experience.

If you would like to read more about these features, start here:

17 key features for a purchase order system.

The Bottom Line

To recap, here are the best purchase order software to try this year:

1. ProcureDesk – Best of the best
2. QuickBooks – Best for small companies that don’t need an approval process.
3. Procurify – Best for medium-sized companies.
4. Kissflow – Best for companies that need a generic workflow tool.

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