Punchout catalogs - Everything you need to know.

Most of what a business buys day to day is relatively straightforward. A new starter needs a laptop and a monitor. The office needs more printer paper. And someone’s lost their keycard to the office… again. 

None of these need a sourcing event or a negotiation for any of it. 

But that's exactly why it's hard to control. When the approved way to buy something means a request form, a separate supplier login and a route through negotiators and departmental stakeholders, employees look for a quicker route. 

They use a personal account, put it on a company card, or order from whoever delivers fastest. But the money still ends up comes out of a department’s budget, but the necessary tracking disappears.

A punchout catalog is designed to close that gap.

What is a “punchout catalog”?

A punchout catalog connects a procurement platform directly to the online store of a chosen business supplier - such as Amazon, Office Depot or Target. This is where pre-approved items like laptops, stationary and general office supplies can be purchased. 

However, instead of leaving the procurement system to use the online store, an employee opens the supplier from inside it, browses the supplier's own site and builds a cart as they normally would.

The difference comes at checkout. Rather than placing the order on the supplier's site, the completed cart returns to the procurement platform as a purchase request, with the item details already filled in. From there, it goes through the same review and approval as any other purchase.

Hosted vs punchout

It's often compared with a hosted catalog, where a supplier's pre-defined products and prices are stored inside the procurement platform. But someone has to keep it up to date every time the supplier's range or pricing changes.

A punchout catalog skips that step, because the employee is looking at the supplier's live catalog, with current products, stock and pricing at source.

How does a punchout catalog work?

A typical punchout purchase has five steps:

1. The employee selects a supplier. They start in the procurement platform and choose an approved supplier.
2. The supplier storefront opens. The procurement system identifies the organization, allowing the supplier to open the appropriate account and show the relevant catalog and pricing.
3. The employee builds their cart. They browse current products and availability directly on the supplier’s site and choose what they need.
4. The cart returns to procurement. Instead of becoming an order immediately, the product, quantity and pricing information is passed back into the procurement platform.
5. The purchase is approved. The cart becomes a purchase request and follows the appropriate workflow before the order is placed.

Punchout connections commonly use cXML, or Commerce eXtensible Markup Language, to pass this information between the procurement platform and supplier. SAP environments may also use OCI, or Open Catalog Interface.

For the employee, that technical layer should be invisible. They simply move from the procurement platform to the supplier and back again.

Why it matters

Keeps product information current

Products, stock and pricing come directly from the supplier rather than from an internal catalog that may have been uploaded weeks or months ago.

The supplier maintains the information at source, so procurement does not have to continually update a duplicate catalog.

Uses negotiated supplier pricing

Where the organization has agreed commercial terms with the supplier, employees can access the pricing available through the company’s account when they buy.

That matters because negotiating a better rate only creates value if employees actually purchase through the route where it applies.

Removes manual data entry

Without punchout, an employee may find what they need on a supplier’s website and then manually copy the product, quantity and price into a purchase request.

Punchout brings those details back with the cart instead.

The employee does not enter the same information twice, and procurement receives the purchase details directly from the supplier.

Keeps approvals before the order

Building a punchout cart does not mean the purchase has been placed.

The cart returns to the procurement platform first, where it can follow the appropriate approval workflow. The employee gets the supplier buying experience without bypassing the company’s purchasing controls.

Reduces off-process spend

Employees are more likely to follow an approved process when it is easy to use.

If buying a keyboard requires copying product information into a form, waiting for approval and then rebuilding the same order, putting it on a card starts to look like the easier option.

Punchout removes much of that friction while still producing a purchase record, approval trail and visibility for procurement and finance.

Helps to reduce maverick spend

Employees can still browse the supplier websites they are used to, but they enter them through the company’s purchasing process. Their cart comes back for approval rather than disappearing onto a personal or corporate card.

The approved route becomes the convenient route.

How it works in Vertice

Vertice's Punchout Catalog sits in the buying stage of intake-to-procure, after a supplier has been selected. 

An employee opens their chosen supplier from within Vertice and shops the live catalog, seeing current products, availability and the pricing procurement has previously negotiated. When the cart is complete, it comes straight back into Vertice as a purchase request, with the purchase details already captured.

That request is then routed through the right approval workflow and budget checks before anything is ordered, and the PO is created in Vertice. The request, the approval and the order all stay in one place, so there's a full record of what was bought, by whom and on what terms.

For purchases that punchout isn't suited to, like software and services, Vertice supports these through its wider procurement workflows.

Making the right way the easy way

Procurement has never had much trouble writing a purchasing policy. The hard part is getting people to follow it when all they need is a keyboard or a pack of pens.

Another reminder or a tighter policy doc rarely fixes that. What does is make the approved route the quickest one. That's the idea behind punchout: employees get what they need faster, and procurement and finance keep the control and visibility they need, without having to chase it.