Supplier and purchase-order software you own

Supplier and purchase-order software gets searched by two different people who think they want the same thing. One has a renewal that rolled over because nobody was watching the date. The other has a purchase nobody remembers approving. Those are two problems with two answers, and buying the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake.

The two halves, named properly

The supplier register is about the relationship and the calendar: who the vendors are, what each contract says, when it renews, when it expires, and what has been committed by category. Supplia is that half.

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The approval chain is about a single transaction: who may say yes to a purchase of this size, and what the record shows afterwards. Approva is that half.

A team that buys the register and expects approvals will be disappointed, and the reverse is equally true. Plenty of organisations end up running both, and they join at exactly one point: the numbered purchase order.

What owning the copy changes

Procurement platforms price per user per month, and the users are everyone who buys anything -- so the pricing penalises applying the control completely. Both products here are licensed per installation, so putting every cost-centre owner and every buyer into them costs nothing extra.

The record is the other half of the argument. A contract register is only useful as history: the renewal you want to catch is eighteen months away, and the approval you want to look up is the one from two years ago. Held in your own database, both survive a change of software vendor, a change of finance system and a change of staff.

What to look for in the register half

Dates that do arithmetic. Supplia's alert board is computed from the dates, so a renewal window opening is a state the system derives rather than a reminder somebody set.

Status that cannot go stale. A contract's status follows from its dates rather than from the last person to touch the record.

The signed document in the register. The contract PDF filed with the row it belongs to, served only through a permission-checked route, with the file type decided by the bytes rather than the extension.

A renewal calendar you can subscribe to, with the feed URL treated as a credential: stored hashed, revocable, and carrying no contact details or contract values.

Committed spend by category. Which is the number a budget conversation actually needs.

What to look for in the approval half

Routing by amount, to one, two or three approvers, per cost centre.

The rule frozen on the record at submission, so a threshold change next year does not rewrite last year's history.

A numbered purchase order generated from the approval, which is the object the supplier receives and the thing the register can point at.

Money in integer cents, because a threshold comparison is exactly where floating-point arithmetic routes an approval to the wrong tier.

The limits, stated plainly

Supplia is not a contract-lifecycle suite: no redlining, no versioning, no approval routing inside it, no clause library and no electronic signature. It files the signed thing and watches the dates around it. There is no accounting or payment integration -- values and payment terms are recorded text and numbers -- and cross-currency contract values are never summed, because the display currency is one business-wide setting. Uploaded documents carry a size cap. One company per installation.

Approva posts to no general ledger, moves no money, and does no three-way matching between order, receipt and invoice. There are no punchout catalogues and no supplier portals: a request describes the purchase in your own words. One currency and one organisation per installation.

Neither product files anything with anybody, and neither logs into a supplier portal on your behalf.

Questions people ask

Which one do I need if a contract auto-renewed on me? The register. That is a calendar problem, and Supplia's date arithmetic and alert board exist for exactly it.

Which one do I need if a purchase happened without approval? The approval chain. Approva routes by amount and freezes the rule that applied on the record.

Do they share data? They join at the purchase order rather than through a packaged integration. Each ships a REST API with signed webhooks, which is how an approved request becomes a row elsewhere without retyping.

Where to look next

The product pages are Supplia for the register and Approva for the approvals, each with its own feature record and its own stated limits, and the Back-Office Suite holds them together. The alternatives page covers one of the hosted procurement platforms people arrive from, another covers a second, and the side-by-side sets them against each other. For what those platforms charge, read the observatory: each figure is quoted verbatim beside the date it was read and a link to the page it came from, and a platform that hides its price behind a call is recorded as doing so. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown there.