Procurement
This section is for developers wiring a storefront or an integration into how a business buyer actually purchases. On their side, a cart is rarely just an order. It is booked to a cost centre, it may need a manager's sign-off, and in larger companies it starts and ends in the buyer's own procurement system.
Three core Apps cover this, grouped under Procurement in the API Explorer:
| App | Answers | Base path |
|---|---|---|
| Punchout | How a buyer reaches your shop from SAP, Ariba, Coupa or an IDS system, and how the cart goes back | /v1/punchout |
| Cost centers | Which cost centres a buyer may book to, and how much budget each has left | /v1/cost-centers |
| Procurement | Whether a submitted cart becomes an order straight away, is held for approval, or is refused | /v1/procurement |
These are shipped Apps, not a pattern you build. A punchout connection is an account and a mapping. Cost centres, budgets and approval rules are records you create. What stays yours is the storefront they run in and the rules your customer wants.
How they fit together
- Punchout needs neither of the others. The buyer's procurement system does the approving and ordering, and the cart goes back to it. The punchout App creates no order.
- Cost centers and Procurement work as a pair in a checkout on your storefront. Procurement asks Cost centers whether a budget allows the spend, then has it hold the amount while a request waits and spend it once there's an order. It never keeps a budget of its own.
- The two sides meet at one point. A cost centre can be restricted to punchout accounts, either offered only inside the named accounts or hidden inside them. Procurement reads the punchout visit behind a cart to apply that restriction.
In this section
- Punchout — accounts for OCI, cXML and IDS 2.5, entry addresses, the probe, field mappings, the hand-back, refusals and limits.
- Cost centers — cost centres, budgets and their ledger, restrictions and contact limits, the reservation calls, and vocabularies.
The Procurement reference page is still being written. Until it is published, the API Explorer has every route of it.
For the walkthrough, see Connect a procurement system by punchout.