You’d be surprised at how many $100M+ businesses are running on duct tape when it comes to their procure-to-pay (P2P) process.

 

I recently encountered a services company—no inventory, just pure services—that had a textbook case of what I’ll call “death by workflow.”

 

Here’s the play-by-play:

• PO requisition approval

• PO issuance

• Invoice lands

• Shipping receipt confirmed

• Then, finally, payment.

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Five steps. And here’s the kicker: 80% of requisitions are already accompanied by an invoice.

Let that sink in.

By the time the request is made, the vendor has already billed them. 💣

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Naturally, someone on the team raises a very understandable question:

“Why not just pay the invoice once a field manager confirms the service was delivered?”

 

Here’s why:
      Because that’s not a process. That’s a fire drill. 🚨

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Why This "Invoice-First" Mentality Is a Financial Red Flag 🚩

Approving invoices post-delivery, without pre-commitment controls, is a recipe for:

     💥 Broken budgets
     🤷‍♂️ No accountability
     🧩 Monthly close chaos
     🕳️ Cash flow black holes

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You’re building a business where every dollar of spend is reactive, unplanned, and unaccountable. That doesn’t scale. That’s how companies burn money without realizing it.

And let’s not even get into the segregation of duties problem—letting the same person approve the invoice and confirm the service? You might as well hand them a blank check. 📝💀

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The Real Problem: You're Approving Too Late

If 80% of your POs are created after the invoice arrives, it’s not that your approval process is too complex—it’s that your people are bypassing it entirely.

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You don’t need to simplify approval.
You need to fix behavior upstream.

This isn’t about letting vendors dictate your timing.
It’s about designing a system where good spend flows fast and bad spend hits friction.

 

What Smart Finance Leaders Do Instead 💼

Modern tools are changing the game. You don’t need to stay stuck in the paper-heavy dark ages of POs and email approvals. There are better ways to create a segmented, pre-approved, high-velocity P2P process.

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Two standout platforms:

💳 Brex – Issue controlled virtual cards, preset budgets, and real-time alerts
🚀 Ramp – Intelligent routing, spend policy enforcement, and zero-lag reporting

Both allow you to define rules by spend type, amount, vendor, and team. Routine spend glides through, while edge cases get flagged.

✅ Pre-approvals get baked into workflows.
✅ Spend visibility goes real-time.
✅ Cash flow forecasting? Finally accurate. 📊

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The CFO Mandate: Make Spend Easy When It Should Be—and Impossible When It Shouldn’t 🧠💣

As a CFO, your job isn’t to block spend—it’s to create a frictionless, compliant highway for good spend and a maze of guardrails for everything else.

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That starts with one non-negotiable: the CFO must be aware of every contract signed and have complete sign-off on all financial commitments before they hit the P&L. Without this single point of accountability, even the best tools and workflows can’t prevent budget leaks and surprise liabilities.

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If you’re stuck with a bloated procure-to-pay process that everyone ignores anyway, don’t shortcut the system. Rebuild it. Give your field teams the tools to operate with speed—and give your finance team the control and visibility they need to sleep at night.

The result? A business that moves fast without blowing through its wallet.
And a P&L you can actually trust. 💥📈