Order
Order is a Spend Efficiency Platform that helps businesses save time, save money, and gain clarity into their spend. Order eliminates manual purchasing and payment tasks and gives your team one place to purchase, approve, track and pay for all the physical goods your business needs. With customizable budgets and reporting, operations and finance teams can take back control over the buying process and start spending efficiently.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, Order oversees nearly half a billion in annualized spend across hundreds of customers like WeWork, SoulCycle, Lume, and High Level Health. Order has raised $50M in funding from industry-leading investors like MIT, Stage 2 Capital, Rally Ventures, 645 Ventures, and more. Order has been proudly named a ‘50 to Watch’ by Spend Matters and a ‘Best Place to Work’ by BuiltIn.
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50 to Know / 50 to Watch
About Order
Order is a Spend Efficiency Platform that helps businesses save time, save money, and gain clarity into their spend. Order eliminates manual purchasing and payment tasks and gives your team one place to purchase, approve, track and pay for all the physical goods your business needs. With customizable budgets and reporting, operations and finance teams can take back control over the buying process and start spending efficiently.
Purchasing:
Easily place and manage all orders in a centralized location.
– Curate a custom catalog: Purchase everything your business needs through Order, instead of ordering through each individual vendor. From online marketplaces to big-box stores to industry-specific vendors, they’re all in your custom Order catalog.
– Discover savings: Save money on your purchases by tapping into Order’s $4 billion in buying power. And, Order strategically sources products to discover savings on the same products you’re purchasing today.
– Automate your purchasing: Speed up your purchasing process and remove manual errors by automatically generating purchase orders from approved purchase requests. And, easily buy your frequently-purchased products based on premade shopping lists and orders.
– Track your orders: Stay up-to-date on your orders across all vendors by tracking their statuses — from approval to fulfillment to delivery — in one location.
Payments:
Order makes paying your vendors easy, quick, and convenient
– Pay one bill per month: Significantly reduce your time on accounts payable and pay all of your vendors for every purchase placed via your custom catalog on one monthly bill.
– Access net payment terms: Make the best purchasing decisions, free of cash flow constraints. Leveraging extended net terms through Order like Weekly Net 45 or Monthly Net 30.
– Achieve a 3-way match: Ensure the accuracy of every payment. Confirm that products were ordered, received, and invoiced, so you can easily complete a 3-way match without spending hours on invoice reconciliation.
– Automate your invoice coding: Eliminate manual data entry errors and speed up invoice processing times with automated invoice coding. Every Order invoice contains perfectly coded, granular spend data.
– Share spend data seamlessly: Close books faster and save countless hours getting accurate data into your accounting system. Keep your books up-to-date on all of your Order transactions via API integrations or data exports.
Controls + Visibility:
Approval workflows fit for your organization:
– Generate approvals by account code, user, vendor, location, cost center, and order subtotal
– Improve purchasing turnaround time with automatic order placement upon approval
– Edit purchase requests at the line item level to avoid back-and-forth communication and delays
– Centralize your approvals so that requests don’t get lost in your inbox or messages
Track and limit spending with customizable budgets
– Leverage budgets for users, locations, or cost centers and set them to the cadence that works best for your team
– View changes in your budget as purchases are made, so your team never overspends
– Allocate portions of a budget to specific types of products to control exactly how money is spent
Detailed reporting for better spend decisions
– Generate granular reports with spend broken down by user, vendor, location, and more
– View your spend and budgets in real-time to identify areas for cost savings
– Create more accurate forecasts with instant access to historical spend data and trend projections
Our View
Order, a 2019 Future 5 company, is a procure-to-pay solution that defies the conventional expectations of what P2P should be. Rather than see its technology as a way to automate business processes (e.g., catalog management, ordering, invoicing and payments), Order contends that automation can sometimes be a symptom of dis-function rather than a panacea to inefficient business processes.
With that in mind, the Order solution supports end-to-end purchasing by attacking the root problems themselves. Rather than construct catalogs via vendor portals or uploaded CSV, Order helps clients build one dynamic “super” catalog off of which all users can compliantly order. And rather than pay vendors directly, clients consolidate their purchases into a single weekly or monthly invoice to Order, which provides a uniformly coded account of all spending.
Negotiatus provides a solution for end-to-end purchasing, but with notably different approaches to enabling the P2P process. Businesses can construct a single catalog using imported order history from vendor shopping carts on websites, along with URL-based requisitions and invoice flips. It also allows businesses to pay consolidated invoices, reducing thousands of invoices to simply weekly or monthly ones payable to Order. It even has some unique business model elements, such as sponsored product recommendations when a given item can be substituted at a lower cost. Overall, it’s definitely a fresh take on what a P2P solution could be.
So, why did Order (Negotiatus) make it onto the 2019 Future 5 list?
Rather than make incremental improvements on the e-procurement model, Order sees the problems facing procurement teams as structural, and thus the whole philosophy of how these tools are built and deployed needs to change.
In a market where plenty of solutions are taking a UX/UI enhancement approach to updating a technology category, Order’s philosophy stands out as one that is trying to address the root problems of P2P, instead of perpetuating them or at minimum dulling the pain of purchasing. That’s a courageous effort — and one that seems to resonate well with customers.
Any threats or challenges ahead?E-procurement, like e-sourcing, is a well-established market, and buyers come with expectations of what the tool can already do and how it should work. Order has some of the common e-procurement elements but not all of them (e.g., receiving), and the vendor appears to be more at home with newer, younger organizations (e.g, WeWork, SoulCycle) than with traditional large enterprises.
Order actually says its best target customer is the “forward thinking” procurement or finance organization. But if it wants to capture more of the “in the same place” or “backward” thinking market — which, to put it politely, can constitute a strong majority relative to the first group — it will have to compete against other feature-rich competitors looking to capture the same middle-market enterprises.