Airbase vs Procurify for Precision Contract Manufacturers

Raw materials and components tied to a specific job or bill of materials need a purchase order committed before the vendor ships, because that PO is what your cost accounting will eventually reconcile against. Maintenance, repair and operating supplies, and office spend, don't carry that same reconciliation burden. Treating them as one undifferentiated purchasing category is the single most common mistake a growing manufacturer makes when setting up procure-to-pay.

The test is simple: if a purchase can change what a finished part costs to produce, it needs a purchase order and a three-way match. If it can't, a card with a reasonable limit is usually enough, and adding requisition steps to it only slows down a purchasing manager who has better things to check.

A three-way match, purchase order, receiving record and invoice, confirms that what you ordered is what arrived and what you're being billed for, and it's the control most likely to catch a pricing error or a short shipment before it becomes a cost-accounting headache weeks later. Procurify's requisition-and-receiving workflow is purpose-built for this; it's the strongest reason to run raw-material purchasing through a requisition-based platform rather than a card.

A short shipment that goes unnoticed at receiving doesn't just create a billing dispute later; it can hold up a production run entirely if nobody catches the shortfall until the line is already set up to use the material. Catching it at receiving, against the original PO quantity, is a lot cheaper than catching it on the shop floor.

A new CNC machine or a piece of production equipment isn't a routine purchase order; it usually needs sign-off from someone above the shop-floor purchasing manager, and it may involve equipment financing that changes how the purchase flows through your books. Set a dollar threshold above which a purchase automatically routes to a second approver, separate from your standard raw-material requisition chain.

Small tooling, shop supplies bought at a local supplier, and software subscriptions are reasonable candidates for a card with a set limit, and forcing them through a full requisition process just adds friction without adding useful control. The line to draw is whether the purchase feeds into your bill of materials or cost of goods sold; if it doesn't, it probably doesn't need a purchase order.

A procure-to-pay tool that only posts totals to your general ledger misses the point for a manufacturer: you need purchase and receiving data flowing into your cost accounting system so that job costs and standard costs stay accurate. Check how each platform exports data before you commit, and confirm it maps cleanly to the cost centers your accounting system already uses.

Manufacturers that try to roll out purchase orders across every raw material and MRO category at once usually stall, because the shop floor ends up creating requisitions for things that never needed one and the finance team spends its first month approving small MRO purchases instead of watching the material spend that actually matters. Start the requisition-and-match process on your highest-dollar raw-material category, get that discipline working, and expand it to the rest of your bill of materials once the first category runs smoothly.

Give the purchasing manager on that first category a clear, narrow mandate rather than a broad one: match every PO, receipt and invoice for that one material group without exception for the first quarter. A narrow mandate that's actually followed teaches you more about where your process breaks than a broad one nobody has time to fully run.

Roll out purchase orders in this order to avoid stalling the shop floor:

1. Separate raw-material purchases that feed the bill of materials from MRO and office spend, since only the first needs a purchase order.
2. Start the requisition and three-way match process on the raw materials that most affect finished-part cost.
3. Match the purchase order, receiving record and invoice before approving payment on any material purchase.
4. Route capital equipment above a set dollar threshold to a second approver, separate from standard purchasing.
5. Keep small tooling, shop supplies and software subscriptions on cards with set limits instead of full requisitions.
6. Confirm purchase and receiving data exports cleanly into your cost accounting system, not just the general ledger.