Precoro Inc., a procurement-software provider headquartered in New York, says it has spent the past six years reshaping itself from a lightweight purchasing tool into a platform aimed at companies with multiple legal entities and decentralized operations. The evolution reflects a broader shift in business software: mid-sized and upper-mid-market firms want tighter control over global spending without adopting the heavy, expensive procurement modules built into large ERP systems.
According to the company, Precoro's role is not to replace those systems but to sit alongside them, handling day-to-day procure-to-pay workflows with lower implementation overhead and more flexibility.
From Mid-Market Tool to Multi-Entity Layer
Precoro initially found customers among mid-sized organizations seeking to digitize basic purchasing—requests, approvals, and invoices—with minimal IT involvement. By 2019, the company reports, its cloud-based software was in use in 67 countries.
As many of those firms expanded into new regions, their requirements changed. Finance and procurement leaders wanted budgets separated by subsidiary, local supplier catalogs, and approval hierarchies tied to how their organizations actually worked. Those demands pushed Precoro to move beyond single-entity deployments and redesign its core around legal entities.
The goal was to let headquarters enforce global policies—for example, rules on approval thresholds or preferred vendors—while giving subsidiaries the freedom to adapt workflows to local tax rules, currencies, and market conditions.
A Technical Rebuild for Global Operations
To support this model, Precoro rebuilt modules that had been designed for a single corporate structure. Supplier and item records can now be linked to specific legal entities, so that pricing, tax settings, and compliance rules line up with the right jurisdiction. Approval workflows can be configured by geography, department, or spending band, allowing companies to encode matrix structures that previously lived in spreadsheets and email threads.
The company says it uses Google-based optical character recognition to pull data from invoices and support automated three-way matching between purchase orders, receipts, and invoices. The platform handles multiple currencies and offers a multilingual interface, while its OCR can process documents in additional languages—useful for firms buying from suppliers worldwide.
Precoro also points to its application programming interface as a way to keep data from different business units properly segmented. Export and synchronization jobs can be scoped by legal entity so that, for example, invoices from one subsidiary flow into a given ERP instance without bringing along records from other parts of the group.
Compliance, Controls, and Hosting
For companies operating across borders, regulatory compliance is now a central concern. Precoro's public security documentation says the platform is designed to adhere to GDPR and UK GDPR for European users and to California's CCPA. For customers handling healthcare-related purchasing data, the company says it supports HIPAA requirements. Precoro also reports completing an independent SOC 2 Type II audit, which assesses controls related to security and availability.
On the technical side, the firm says it hosts its services on DigitalOcean's multi-region cloud infrastructure, using redundancy and network segmentation to support uptime. The company also states that they offer separate, dedicated hosting for US customers. The software includes multi-factor authentication, single sign-on through identity providers such as Okta, and role-based access controls that can restrict users to specific entities, departments, or documents. Audit trails record user actions, providing the logs needed for internal reviews or regulatory inquiries.
Fitting into Existing Tech Stacks
Precoro's pitch depends heavily on integrations. For purchasing, the platform connects to Amazon Business, supporting punch-out and punch-in scenarios in which users shop from predefined catalogs but keep approval and budget control inside Precoro. Integration with Slack brings real-time notifications and basic approval actions into a channel many teams already use.
For analytics, the company offers connectors to Microsoft Power BI and other business-intelligence tools, allowing customers to overlay procurement data with information from ERP, finance, and operational systems. In its case studies, Precoro describes customers building workflows that start with a requisition request, move through automated approvals, trigger catalog purchases, and then post data back into accounting software such as NetSuite or Xero.
A Distributed Workforce for Distributed Clients
Internally, Precoro runs as a remote-first company, recruiting staff across regions and time zones. Customer-success teams work with clients to configure approval chains, entity structures, and templates. The company says feedback from those implementations feeds into its product roadmap, helping define priorities such as mobile approvals and new integration points.
What the Case Studies Show
The most detailed case study the company publishes involves Bolloré Transport & Logistics South Africa, which manages operations in several African markets. Before Precoro, Bolloré relied on spreadsheets and email for purchasing, which slowed approvals and obscured branch-level spending.
After piloting the software in 2018 at a single warehouse, Bolloré expanded to 82 users in South Africa and then to 12 African locations. Precoro reports that by 2023, more than 300 users across the broader Bolloré group were on the system. According to the case, automated routing cut approval times and improved adherence to budgets.
A separate case centered on a solar-energy producer describes a twofold reduction in procurement cycle times and a drop in manual errors after a switch to Precoro. As with any vendor-produced materials, these examples reflect the experiences of willing participants and highlight successes rather than failures.
Analysts' View: Mid-Market Player, Not Enterprise Giant
The company has also drawn attention from procurement analysts. In recent IDC MarketScape reports on spend-orchestration and AI-enabled procure-to-pay software, Precoro is classified as a "Major Player" among a global field of vendors. IDC notes strengths in implementation speed and fit for mid-market companies, while also citing narrower module depth compared with large enterprise suites.
Spend Matters, a research firm focused on procurement technology, has described Precoro as a scalable, intuitive alternative to ERP-centric procurement tools. The publication stresses usability and configuration flexibility, but also acknowledges that the platform targets a different part of the market than fully fledged enterprise suites.
Together, these assessments present Precoro as a credible option for mid-sized and growing organizations, not a direct challenger to upper-enterprise platforms such as SAP Ariba or Coupa.
What Users Like — and What They Don't
User reviews on G2, Capterra, and SoftwareAdvice, while anecdotal, tend to reinforce that picture. Many reviewers praise the interface as easy to learn and highlight responsive customer support. Multi-location organizations frequently point to better visibility into branch-level spending after adoption.
Criticism clusters around depth rather than stability. Some customers say they would like more sophisticated approval logic, deeper inventory workflows, better tax automation or broader integration options. These are common complaints in the mid-market segment, where vendors balance feature ambition against complexity and cost.
A Crowded Field
The procure-to-pay market has grown more crowded as software firms carve out niches along the purchasing chain. Competing vendors position themselves accordingly. Procurify stresses configurability and breadth of features. ProcureDesk emphasizes intake workflows—the front door for purchase requests. Zip, a newer entrant, markets itself as an orchestration layer for large enterprises.
Precoro tends to compete where organizations have outgrown spreadsheets and email but are reluctant to embark on multi-year ERP procurement rollouts. The company's multi-entity capabilities appeal to firms operating across several countries or subsidiaries, while its mid-range positioning keeps implementation times and subscription costs below those of heavyweight suites.
Looking ahead, Precoro's public roadmap points to further investment in multi-entity budgeting, more advanced inventory capabilities, and AI-enabled features such as anomaly detection and forecasting. Those efforts are unfolding against a backdrop of supply-chain disruption, nearshoring, and rising demand for real-time visibility into commitments and cash outflows.
For now, Precoro sits in the growing layer of software that tries to give mid-sized and upper-mid-market companies better control over global spending without forcing them into the complexity of enterprise procurement stacks. Whether that niche expands—or is squeezed from above by larger vendors moving down-market—will determine how far the company's 80-country starting point can carry it.
Join the Conversation