Every company knows its visible purchases: raw materials, components, everything that goes directly into the product or service it sells.
Those are tracked, negotiated, controlled. And then there are the others. Office supplies, software licenses, maintenance, travel, one-off services, IT equipment. Indirect purchasing.
Diffuse, rarely strategic when looked at one by one, ordered by almost everyone in the company, and tracked by almost no one.
Taken in isolation, each purchase looks negligible: a supply order here, a software subscription there. Added up over a year, they weigh far more than most people imagine. According to Spendesk, indirect purchasing accounts for between 15% and 50% of a company's total purchasing volume, and up to 10 to 25% of its revenue. Other analyses put the average at around 50% of all purchasing. In other words: roughly one euro out of every two spent escapes the discipline applied to everything else.
The problem isn't the spending itself. It's that it happens in a disorderly way. And a looming deadline is about to shine a spotlight on that disorder: starting September 1, 2026, receiving electronic invoices becomes mandatory for all companies subject to VAT, while September 2027 will apply to large enterprises and mid-sized companies (ETI).
But it's hard to properly dematerialize your invoices when you don't already have control over your orders.
This is exactly what e-procurement is about. And let's say it up front, to put an end to a persistent misunderstanding: e-procurement is not primarily a tool for buying more cheaply. It's a way to stop buying haphazardly.
If indirect purchasing is so poorly managed, it's first and foremost the result of a structural effect that kicks in almost automatically.
The Pareto principle applies almost to the letter: so-called “class C” purchases account for only a small share of total spend but concentrate the bulk of order lines and suppliers. Distributor Unite estimates that class C spending represents around 20% of spend but involves nearly 80% of suppliers. Lots of transactions, lots of contacts, for small unit amounts: the perfect breeding ground for no one to really pay attention.
As a result, visibility is sorely lacking. According to Fluxym, up to 79% of companies admit they have no overall view of their indirect purchasing. When four out of five companies don't know precisely what they're buying, from whom, and on what terms, the consequences pile up quietly.
The most visible form of this disorder has a name: maverick buying. These are orders placed outside any framework, bypassing approved suppliers, negotiated contracts, and approval processes. A last-minute equipment rental, software subscribed to by a team without going through procurement, an urgent order from an unknown supplier. Each instance of maverick buying seems justified in the moment. Added together, they cause companies to lose the benefit of negotiated rates, multiply the number of suppliers, and make spending impossible to read.
The unit price is only the tip of the iceberg. Scattered management drives up the processing cost of every order and every invoice, drags down the productivity of procurement and accounting teams, and raises the total cost of ownership of purchased goods. It also makes it impossible to assess supplier performance and reliability — a blind spot that has become a real problem in an era of due-diligence obligations and CSR targets, where companies must be able to account for their supply chain.
A simple example gives a sense of scale: a mid-sized company (ETI) with a few hundred employees can easily deal with several hundred suppliers for its indirect purchasing alone: printers, equipment rental firms, software publishers, agencies, maintenance providers, various supplies. Each one invoices at its own pace, on its own terms, sometimes without a written contract. Multiply the follow-up emails, billing disputes, and duplicate suppliers for the same need, and the administrative cost of each small order ends up outweighing the savings that a negotiation could have delivered. That's the paradox of indirect purchasing: it's not so much the price of things that costs money, but the way they're bought.
The good news is that this poorly cultivated ground is also a goldmine. Feedback compiled by Weproc shows that structured management of indirect purchasing can cut associated costs by 15% to 25%. For a category that accounts for half of all purchasing, that's far from a minor effect. So what should you actually do about it?
Taking back control of your indirect purchasing doesn't mean locking everything down or turning every supply order into an obstacle course. It means restoring order where there is none, across four different areas.
The starting point: knowing who you're buying from. Build a base of approved, contractually bound suppliers, rather than a nebulous cloud of contacts accumulated through successive emergencies. This is the precondition for negotiating terms, tracking performance, and meeting due-diligence obligations.
Once suppliers are approved, their offerings are structured into catalogs accessible to internal buyers, with the right products, the right negotiated prices, and the right terms. The occasional buyer no longer has to go hunting: they order within a framework that's already defined. This is where maverick buying declines most naturally — not through constraint, but because the easy path becomes the right one.
Every type of spend gets its own approval process: thresholds, approvers, budget rules. Not to slow things down, but so that the right person approves the right expense at the right time — automatically, without chasing emails or losing messages. Approval stops being an informal bottleneck and becomes a tracked flow.
Finally, everything above generates usable data: who ordered what, from whom, when, at what price, with what approval. This traceability is what turns indirect purchasing from a blind spot into a manageable category — and, incidentally, what makes compliance with electronic invoicing possible.
One aspect is too often overlooked: indirect purchasing is, by nature, carried out by non-buyers. A project manager, a site manager, or a member of a marketing team places orders without being a purchasing professional. Taking back control therefore doesn't mean stripping them of that ability — that would be unworkable — but it does mean channeling it, by giving them a path so simple and so fast that they have no reason to go around it. Any approach that complicates their daily work produces the opposite of the intended effect. Lasting control depends as much on ease of use as on rules.
As you can see: the primary gain isn't a discount wrung out of a price. It's control regained.
In theory, everything described above could run on spreadsheets and emails. In practice, once volume grows, that stops working. This is the role of an e-procurement platform like Uppler's: to provide the tools for controlling purchasing end to end, from the moment a need is expressed all the way through to the invoice.
A good e-procurement software brings together several building blocks that, on their own, aren't enough:
The value of a unified e-procurement platform, rather than a patchwork of separate tools, comes down to this last point: continuity. When the purchase request, approval, order, receipt, and invoice all flow through the same process, the data stays reliable end to end — and it's this continuity that delivers savings, compliance, and peace of mind, all at once.
There's an interesting point of convergence between e-procurement and another model: the marketplace. A company handling a large volume of indirect purchasing across many suppliers may benefit from running its own purchasing marketplace — an internal marketplace where its approved suppliers display their catalogs, and where employees order within a controlled framework.
Punchout is precisely the link between these two worlds: it connects supplier catalogs to the internal purchasing environment. This is what allows a marketplace approach to serve e-procurement needs, and vice versa. For a company centralizing purchasing across multiple sites or subsidiaries, this shift changes the game: the same approved suppliers, the same catalogs, and the same approval rules apply to everyone, while each entity keeps its own ordering autonomy.
Companies move from a collection of scattered purchases to a governed purchasing marketplace. We cover this overlap in more depth in our dedicated article, how the marketplace format becomes a powerful tool for e-procurement.
Does that mean the two should be treated as one and the same? No. Marketplace, B2B e-commerce, and e-procurement serve different roles, and mixing them up without clarity leads to the wrong tooling decisions. We've devoted an entire guide to telling these models apart: B2B marketplace, B2B e-commerce, e-procurement: which one do you really need?. For the procurement side of implementation, our e-procurement platform is built for exactly this case.
Not all e-procurement solutions are created equal, and the right choice depends first on your own context. A few criteria are worth scrutinizing before you commit:
Faced with a project that potentially touches half of your purchasing, the temptation is to try to tackle everything at once. That's the surest way to get nothing done. The right approach is the opposite: start small, but start in the right place.
Start with an analysis. Before bringing in any tools, map things out. A quick audit of your indirect spending — who buys what, from how many suppliers, within or outside an approved framework — almost always turns up surprises, and is enough to identify the two or three categories where the stakes are highest.
Use indirect purchasing as your entry point. Precisely because they're less strategic individually, they make an ideal learning ground: you can test catalogs, workflows, and traceability without putting the core of the business at risk. The gains achieved fund and justify extending the approach to the rest.
Measure early, measure simply. Set yourself one or two clear indicators from the start: the share of orders placed within the approved framework, the number of active suppliers per category, the average approval time. These are enough to demonstrate the value of the project and build internal buy-in — far better than an exhaustive dashboard that no one will ever look at.
Use the 2026 deadline as a trigger. The electronic invoicing requirement isn't just one more constraint: it's an opportunity to overhaul the entire chain, from order to invoice. You might as well turn a regulatory obligation into the starting point for a broader effort to regain control.
Taking back control of your indirect purchasing isn't a cost-cutting project in disguise. It's a project about clarity. A company that knows who buys what, from whom, and on what terms has already won the essential battle: it no longer just absorbs its spending — it steers it. Savings follow, logically.
And at a time when electronic invoicing is about to make every flow visible — to tax authorities and to your business partners alike — this clarity stops being a management nicety and becomes a prerequisite. Better to turn it into a strength than to endure it.
To go further, explore our e-procurement platform or request a demo tailored to your context.
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