How to Automate Coupa

Every purchase in a Coupa company starts as a requisition

In a company that runs purchasing on Coupa, buying anything starts with a requisition. Coupa builds its approval chain from the requester's approval limit and next approver, then adds any custom chains the administrators have set by account, supplier or commodity. Once the last approver signs, the requisition becomes a purchase order and goes to the supplier.

Suppliers answer through the Coupa Supplier Portal, which is free for them, or straight from the PO email through Supplier Actionable Notifications, with no portal account at all. The invoice comes back the same way or as an e-invoice, and accounts payable matches it against the PO and, for goods, the receipt. Coupa also runs sourcing, contracts, expenses and payments, and hands the results to the ERP that keeps the ledger, such as SAP or Oracle.

Requesters and approvers pass through for minutes at a time. Procurement analysts and AP specialists work in it all day, and suppliers log in from outside.

A delivery can arrive on Tuesday and never be received in Coupa

A purchase order goes to a supplier who neither logs in to the portal nor presses the buttons in the PO email. The ship date and a revised unit price come back as a reply to the buyer, who types them in, or forgets to.

Accounts payable meets the result when the invoice arrives. The invoice sits at Pending Receipt because nobody entered the delivery, although the pallet arrived on Tuesday, or lands on Tolerance Hold because the price moved by more than the company allows without approval. A week later the supplier emails to ask why it has not been paid, and the AP specialist spends the morning working out who ordered it and whether it came.

Requests begin outside Coupa too. A spare part drops below its reorder point in the maintenance system, and a team keeps its wish list on a shared spreadsheet until somebody turns it into requisitions.

Coupa reminds and escalates approvers on a schedule

In its approval settings, Coupa emails each approver a reminder every set number of hours, or on its benchmark of a third of the average cycle time. It can also escalate past an approver who sits on a requisition, PO or invoice longer than the cycle time, though never past the final approver.

On invoices, two-way and three-way matching compare each line with the PO and the receipt, and an invoice enters an approval chain only when it breaks a tolerance, fails the matching rules or meets a supplier setting that requires approval. Supplier Actionable Notifications let a supplier acknowledge a PO, or invoice from it, without a portal account. Intake & Orchestration accepts requests from Slack, Teams, email or forms and routes each to the right approvers; it is built on Tonkean, which has since joined Coupa.

A supplier who replies to the buyer's own email has acknowledged nothing in Coupa, and the ship date sits in the buyer's inbox. The proof that a delivery came is on a carrier's tracking page or the dock's paperwork, and the invoice waits at Pending Receipt until the requester enters the receipt. A part's reorder point sits in the maintenance system, where a planner has to notice it.

Pending Receipt invoices that come with their proof of delivery

For the buyer, every PO past its acknowledgement deadline could arrive matched to the supplier's last email, with the ship date or revised price ready to enter, or with a polite chaser in Gmail drafts where the supplier has said nothing.

An AP specialist could see each invoice at Pending Receipt with the carrier's proof of delivery attached, while the requester gets a note naming the PO and asking them to receive it in Coupa so the match runs. An invoice on Tolerance Hold could come with the email in which the buyer agreed the new price.

A planner could check and submit requisitions drafted from the maintenance system's reorder points, and a team lead could send one requisition per supplier instead of a dozen from that spreadsheet. For an approver whose queue outlasts Coupa's reminders, the procurement lead could put a twenty-minute clearing slot in their Google Calendar.

A planner submits every requisition WebRun prepares in Coupa

Matching open POs to the buyer's inbox, and Pending Receipt invoices to carrier tracking pages, means reading Coupa and several outside sites every morning. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, and your Coupa administrator sets up the user it works under.

A requisition it prepares is left unsubmitted for the planner to check, and the buyer decides which supplier chasers go out. Give its user no approval limit and leave it out of every approval chain, so only the people in Coupa's chains can approve.

A buyer with a long list of open POs gets the most from the confirmation chaser, which checks each one past its deadline and leaves a chaser in Gmail. The contract renewal countdown reads the contract list every Monday.