Purchase orders
Purchase order analysis: the purchase commitment checked against the contract, before the invoice
Purchase order analysis means confronting every order, before it goes to the supplier, with the framework contract, the price schedule and the commitment rules: unit price, discount, supplier under contract, delegation threshold. Zylio’s Compliance agent reads the order, finds the applicable agreement, flags the gap and presents it to your approver. It approves nothing.
The problem
A wrong order produces a compliant invoice
The purchase order is the moment the price is set. Once issued, the rest of the chain takes it as the reference: receiving checks that what was ordered arrived, matching checks that the invoice corresponds to the order. If the order price is wrong (keyed from memory, copied from an old quote, outside the schedule), the invoice that repeats it passes every check. It is compliant with an error.
That is why non-compliance is discovered late, when it is discovered at all. At invoice stage it is too late not to order; at best, you claim. At year end, you find that spend committed under a framework contract was partly placed off contract, at prices nobody compared, by requesters who did not know an agreement existed.
Purchase order analysis moves the check upstream: to the moment the commitment can still be corrected, at no cost, before the supplier has received it.
What is checked
Six checkpoints on an order before it is issued
The unit price against the schedule
Is the price keyed on the order the one in the price schedule, the framework contract or the price list in force on that date? The gap is quantified line by line.
The discount and the tier
Does the order reach a volume tier provided by the contract, alone or cumulated with previous orders? Is the expected discount applied?
The supplier under contract
Does an agreement exist for this spend category, with this supplier or another? An order placed with an off-contract supplier when a contract covers the need is flagged as such.
The off-catalogue reference
Does the item ordered exist in the schedule? Does an equivalent under contract exist? The off-catalogue order is not forbidden; it is named.
The threshold and the delegation
Does the order amount exceed the requester’s delegation threshold, the budget line, or the contract ceiling? The overrun is flagged with the threshold concerned.
The terms
Delivery lead time, free freight, payment terms, incoterm: does the order restate the negotiated terms, or the less favourable ones the supplier proposes by default?
The mechanism
How the Compliance agent analyses a purchase order
- 01
Read the order
From an export or an API of your ERP, or from the document itself: PDF, form, spreadsheet. Supplier, lines, references, quantities, units, prices, terms: each value stays linked to its source.
- 02
Find the applicable agreement
The framework contract, amendment, schedule or price list in force at the order date, for this supplier, this entity and this category; more than 12,000 price lines per framework contract pose no difficulty.
- 03
Confront line by line
Price, discount, reference, terms, threshold. Each gap is quantified, tied to the authoritative clause, and accompanied by its reason. The calculation is deterministic: the same order produces the same result tomorrow.
- 04
Classify and present in your workflow
Compliant order, minor gap within tolerance, gap to arbitrate, off-scope commitment: each order receives a level, and the approver sees the gap and the evidence before signing. The signature remains theirs, in their tool.
How a purchase order, whatever its format, becomes usable lines.
Before and after
What the upstream check avoids, and what it does not replace
Checking the order avoids the invoice compliant with an error: the off-schedule price, the off-contract supplier, the forgotten discount are corrected before the commitment exists. It is the only moment when the gap costs nothing to fix. Approvers, for their part, stop signing orders they have no means to verify: the gap and the clause are in front of them, and compliant orders need no more than a glance.
This check does not replace the ones that follow. A supplier may invoice something other than what it accepted on the order; a delivery may differ. Checking the invoiced price and matching invoice, order and receipt remain necessary, and they are simpler when the order is right: the post-order gap, if there is one, then comes from the supplier, not the requester.
The same case produces the same decision, today as in six months: the rules are applied deterministically.
What it changes
What changes when an order is analysed before being issued
Contract coverage becomes measurable and manageable. For each category, the share of orders placed under contract, off contract when a contract existed, and off contract for lack of an agreement. That figure, tied to the orders that make it up, says where to negotiate a new contract and where to enforce the existing one. From 5% to 100% of your purchases checked, depending on the scope you choose.
The approval workflow stops being a bottleneck. On the scopes analysed, 15 to 45% of time handed back to teams, per FTE, depending on the scope and the maturity of the data: the time spent looking for the contract to verify an order is returned; the decision time remains, and is better spent.
Margin is protected before it is lost. On the scope analysed, between 1 and 7% of margin recovered: at order stage, part of that amount does not even need recovering, because it was never committed. The 3-week diagnostic, on your data, first measures on past invoices what the upstream check would have avoided.
By category and by entity: what is bought under contract, and what is not.
What Zylio does not do
Three limits, set before the first order is analysed
Zylio does not approve an order, block it or modify it. The approval workflow, delegations of authority and the issuing of the order remain in your ERP (SAP, Sage, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Cegid, Workday) and under the responsibility of your approvers. Zylio reads the order, confronts it with the agreement and presents the gap; it writes nothing back. It does not contact the supplier, and your orders are never used to train a model.
The use case: the threshold, the signatory, and the order that goes around them.
Compliance
Every invoice checked against your agreements.
Checks every invoiced line against what was negotiated: framework agreement, price list, rate schedule, amendment, discount terms, volume thresholds, indexation clauses.
A claim that is documented and enforceable against the supplier, not a hunch.
What Compliance detects
- Invoiced price higher than the negotiated price
- Revision outside its due date or on the wrong index
- Volume discount or tiered rate not applied
- Service outside the contract, item outside the catalogue
- Payment terms not honoured
- A one-cent discrepancy repeated across thousands of lines
Nothing is lost. Everything can be checked, everything can be proven.
- The contract clause and the invoice line, highlighted side by side.
- Every extracted value stays linked to the exact place in the document where it was read.
- The same case produces the same decision, today as in six months: the rules are applied deterministically.
- No discrepancy is set aside in silence. Anything that matches no rule is raised, with its reason.
- The agent records what it did, in the order it did it: who, what, how much, when.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between analysing purchase orders and checking invoices?
Timing. Purchase order analysis confronts the commitment with the contract before it goes to the supplier; invoice checking confronts what is claimed with what was negotiated, after delivery. The first avoids the gap, the second recovers it. Both rely on the same reference set of agreements.
Can Zylio automatically approve compliant orders?
No. Zylio qualifies the order (compliant, minor gap, gap to arbitrate, off scope) and presents that qualification with the evidence to your approver, in your workflow. The signature remains human. A compliant order takes less time to approve; it is not approved without someone.
Does the order already have to be in the ERP?
No. The agent reads an export or an API of your ERP just as well as a draft order in document form: PDF, form, spreadsheet. The check can therefore happen at purchase request stage, before the order is even created in the system.
What happens with an order that has no applicable contract?
It is flagged as such: no agreement covers this supplier or this category. That is not a gap, it is information, the information that makes contract coverage measurable and lets you decide whether to negotiate an agreement, or whether the one-off purchase is justified.
Measurable impact in every environment
More than 5 million procurement documents analysed
Between 1 and 7% of margin recovered
on the scope analysed
From 15 to 45% of time given back to teams, per FTE
depending on the scope and on data maturity
Zylio fits into your existing ecosystem.
The ERP runs the process. Zylio handles the exception and recovers the value that escapes it: invoices without a purchase order, line-by-line price discrepancies, duplicates and overbilling, off-contract spend.
Your data under high security.
Zylio meets the most demanding standards, and nothing is committed without your approval.
- Certifications
- Hosting
- Encryption
- Access
Going further
- Compliance with negotiated pricesThe pillar: the reference set of agreements the order, then the invoice, must respect.
- Reading the purchase orderAll formats, all structures: the order turned into usable lines.
- Detect off-contract purchasesThe use case: the order placed off-process when an agreement existed.
- See an order analysed in a demoOne purchase order, one framework contract, one gap: the agent on screen.
See what this looks like on your own data
Twenty minutes, on a spend category of your choosing. We show you what the agents detect, with the evidence behind it.
- No commitment, on your own data
- Result in 3 weeks
- 20 minutes, no sales pitch
- Your data stays hosted in France
- No change of tool or process