My favorite thing (at least work-related) is designing new capabilities to make our customers more efficient.  The ideas come from everywhere…stuff our customers mention, stuff that we come up with in late-night brainstorming sessions, side projects that could only come from the great minds of our developers, etc.  Our September release typifies this.   I won’t give you the full laundry list of capabilities, but highlight some of the more interesting.

“Enhanced Special Approvers” is a cool feature to build approval paths without all the complexity of getting someone technical to write custom workflows.  Now, you can create all kinds of normal and crazy rules, in addition to using normal management hierarchy, to make sure the right people approve the right requisitions.  For instance, you can say “in addition getting normal management approvals, I want any requisition over $2,500 that is charged to an asset account to be approved by Tim the Controller and if it is over $15,000 then it also needs Sue the CFO’s approval.”  That’s a pretty normal one, but you can make create your own crazy rules based in item description, requisition amount, supplier, department, account and more.  And you can even specify if these special approvers should come before or after the management hierarchy.  Best of all, business users can create these rules in the Coupa UI.

“Line-Level Accounting” is one of the highly requested capabilities that we’re excited to announce.  Now, when you checkout, you can charge the requisition to multiple internal accounts.  So, if I’m buying a computer and some office supplies, I might charge the computer to an “IT equipment” account and the office supplies to an “indirect supplies” account.

“Advanced Search” is one of the features designed and developed by David, our head engineer, who wanted an elegant way for our customers to create queries in the system.  For all of the tables, such as viewing requisitons, purchase orders, invoices, RFQs, you can now do advanced searches in addition to the basic search.  So you can now create a search to find all requisitions where the requisition was submitted between 8/23 and 9/4 for Dell from department ABC.

There are a bunch of other new features including delegate approvals (great for when you are on vacation!), allowing certain approvers to edit a requisition when they are approving it, enhanced price precision so you can buy stuff for less than a cent (needed for our E&C customers who buy cabling at 1.0549 USD) and many more.  We’d be glad to give you more details…just fill out the Contact Us form on the site.

Last, but certainly not least, is the value of On-Demand.   Two weeks ago, we let our customers know about the new capabilities that would be coming.  And last Friday night, we upgraded all of our customers, so by 10pm, they immediately had access to all these new features.   Our customers didn’t have to worry about getting the right patches, getting IT to install them in the right order, running all the data migrations, bringing back up the application, web servers, mail servers, etc and all the associated monitoring.    They can focus on the procurement business processes, not a slew of technical requirements.