Esker offers their eponymous document automation platform, for paperless ordering and billing, and accounts payable / accounts receivable (AP / AR). It can be delivered as a cloud offering (as Esker on Demand), or on-premise (as Esker DeliveryWare).
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Zip Intake-to-Procure
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Zip provides a place for employees to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Each request is routed for approval across procurement, finance, IT, data security, legal, and other teams, and Zip integrates into ERP and P2P solutions to create a PR or draft PO. The vendor states Zip works with Canva, Checkr, Hopin, Zapier, CM Group, and other companies both public and private.
Esker On Demand is great for Sales Order Processing order creation. We use it with web services. It can make table read calls, test order creations (simulate order), and help with order creation. They are also working on change order management, but if you have multiple order entry methods or touch points, this feature may not be usable for your company.
Zip can be used for routing all vendor-level approvals for new vendors and all renewals across our organization. It can also be helpful for managing all purchases from existing vendors. For non-spend related approvals, it’s not as well suited. Zip was definitely designed for procurement workflows. They also have a vendor management portal that links up directly to something like NetSuite for management and visibility.
We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.
Missing the ability to proxy as another user. Currently, if one approver did not set up their delegation, an admin or the approver of that step must reassign each of the approvals to another person.
Bulk upload options for admins to update queues and subqueues.
Missing ability to schedule reports or the option to share a saved view with another user. It would be easier if certain filtered views can be shared with others to avoid each user having to create their own views.
Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.
They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with
I have listed a few that we considered but there were many more in the initial assessment, Esker was priced well and had the best user interface. Was really easy to use and the implementation process was well designed. It was a system that could handle a two tiered delegations of authority for project expenditure and operational expenditure.
Zip is by far the easiest to implement and configure, dramatically reducing the speed to value. Setup and creation of workflows to align with approval processes can be done within weeks and there is no limit to the number of approval flows that can be created. There are value add features such as contract management "lite" (renewal notifications, ability to not contracts/documents as final, etc.). Finally, the cost is multiples lower than more ERP-type suites and platforms.
We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.
Centralized Vendor management to allow better compliance for privacy and security
Our time to close a PR has increased initially but that is due to a more robust approvals process and as we spend more time in the tool that time will be reduced
We now have more time to focus on strategy and negotiations instead of tracking approvals at a manual level
