Procurement & purchasing
Requisitions, approvals, RFQ, evaluation, purchase orders, goods receiving, invoices and payments — the complete procure-to-pay cycle.
See how it worksCatVision Enterprise · Procurement Module
The procurement management system that puts every purchase under control.
CatVision Enterprise Procurement takes a purchase from the moment someone raises a requisition to the moment finance pays the invoice — with multi-level approvals, competitive RFQs, supplier evaluation, purchase orders, goods receiving and a three-way match on every line. Nothing moves without an approval. Nothing happens without an audit trail.
Already a supplier to one of our clients? Open the supplier portal to submit quotes and track purchase orders.
- Configurable approval workflow
- Budget control before commitment
- Full audit trail on every action
- Works alongside Sage
Designed, built and supported by
- Radical SystemsEnterprise software engineering
- CatVision School ERPSister product · catvision.co.zw
- Sage SolutionsSage 200 Evolution · Pastel · 300 · X3
- On‑premise or cloudYour servers or ours
10workflow stages, requisition to payment
46built-in reports, exportable to Excel & PDF
100%of actions written to an immutable audit trail
Zerospreadsheets needed to run procurement
The platform
One accounting suite. Procurement first.
CatVision Enterprise is a modular accounting and business management suite for medium and large organisations. The Procurement module is live today and is the entry point most of our clients start with — because it is where uncontrolled spending, slow approvals and missing paperwork cost the most money.
Without a procurement system
- Requisitions arrive by email and get lost in inboxes
- Approvals happen verbally — nobody can prove who authorised what
- Purchase orders are raised before anyone checks the budget
- Single-source buying with no competitive quotes
- Invoices paid without matching the delivery note
- Month-end spent rebuilding the story from paper files
With CatVision Procurement
- Every request is a numbered record with an owner and a status
- Approvals follow a workflow your administrator designs — visually
- Budget is checked and committed before the order is issued
- RFQs go out to multiple suppliers; quotes are scored, not guessed
- Invoices only pay after a three-way match against PO and GRV
- Month-end is a report, not an investigation
Modules in the CatVision Enterprise suite
Stores & inventory
Stock on hand, movements, issues to departments, internal stock requisitions, returns and reorder visibility across stores.
ExploreAccounts payable & payments
Invoice registration, tolerance checks, payment schedules, payment runs, outstanding payables and remittance tracking.
ExploreBudgets & commitment control
Departmental budgets by account and period, live commitment against budget, and a hard verification gate before spend is approved.
ExploreSupplier relationship management
Supplier register, compliance documents with expiry gates, performance scoring, categories and a self-service supplier portal.
ExploreReporting & business intelligence
46 built-in operational and financial reports, saved views, scheduled exports and dashboards for every role.
See the reportsGeneral ledger & financial reporting
Chart of accounts, journals, trial balance, management accounts and statutory reporting — designed to sit under the modules above.
Fixed assets, HR & payroll
Asset register and depreciation, employee records, payroll and statutory returns — extending the suite across the back office.
Not sure where to start? Most clients deploy Procurement first, prove the control and the savings, then extend into stores, budgets and payables. Talk to us about a phased rollout.
How it works
Requisition to payment, in ten controlled stages
Every stage below is a real screen in the system, with its own permissions, its own inbox and its own audit record. Select a stage to see what happens there.
1. Departmental requisition
A staff member raises a numbered requisition against their department and cost account, with one or many lines, quantities, estimated prices, a required-by date and supporting attachments. Drafts can be saved; a previous request can be repeated in one click.
- Auto-generated reference numbers per document type
- Item lookup from the product catalogue or free-text entry
- Attachments, specifications and justification captured up front
- Requester tracks their own request end to end from a personal dashboard
2. Departmental approval
The requisition lands in the inbox of the supervisor, head of department or director defined by your workflow. They see a read-only summary, the budget position and the full line detail, then approve, reject with a reason, or send it back for correction.
- Approval chains by department, level and value threshold
- Out-of-office delegation so nothing stalls when someone is away
- Reminders and escalation when an approval sits too long
- Every decision stamped with user, time, comment and IP address
3. Procurement intake
Procurement receives approved requisitions, assigns an officer, verifies the specification and decides the sourcing route: competitive RFQ, an existing framework contract, a catalogue item, or issue from stores if the stock is already on hand.
- Officer assignment and workload balancing
- Internal procurement notes kept separate from requester-visible comments
- Consolidation of similar requests into a single sourcing event
- Stores check before buying — avoid purchasing what you already own
4. Request for quotation (RFQ)
Invite suppliers from your register, set a closing deadline and send the RFQ by email with a secure link. Suppliers price the lines in the portal; procurement can also capture a walk-in or telephone quotation manually.
- Multi-supplier invitations with tracked delivery and response status
- Supplier submits online — no spreadsheets emailed back and forth
- Deadline job closes the RFQ automatically and flags non-responders
- Quotations stored against the requisition as permanent evidence
5. Supplier evaluation & award recommendation
Quotes are compared side by side on price, lead time and scored criteria. A hard compliance gate blocks any supplier whose statutory documents are missing or expired — it cannot be bypassed in the interface.
- Side-by-side comparison grid across all responding suppliers
- Weighted scoring: price, delivery, quality, past performance
- Compliance hard gate on tax clearance and registration expiry
- Documented award recommendation with written justification
6. Executive approval
Above your configured thresholds the recommendation goes to executives — Finance Director, COO, CEO — who review the full bundle: requisition, quotes, evaluation, budget position and supplier compliance, in one screen before deciding.
- Value thresholds drive who must approve, automatically
- Complete document bundle attached to the decision
- Budget availability shown at the moment of approval
- Terminal CEO approval for the highest-value commitments
7. Procurement final review
Before an order is issued, the procurement manager works through a mandatory checklist. Every item must be ticked — the system will not release the purchase order until the checks are complete.
- Mandatory pre-issue checklist enforced in code, not by convention
- Final price, currency, tax and delivery terms confirmed
- Supplier banking and compliance re-verified
- Segregation of duties between evaluator, approver and issuer
8. Purchase order
The purchase order is generated from the awarded quotation — no re-keying — approved, and issued to the supplier as a branded PDF and a portal notification. Budget is committed at this point.
- PO built directly from the winning quote lines
- Mandatory view-before-approve, the way Sage users expect
- Branded PDF plus supplier portal acknowledgement
- Spend committed against the departmental budget on issue
9. Goods receiving & GRV
Stores receives against the purchase order line by line, recording quantity accepted, quantity rejected and condition. Over-delivery outside tolerance requires an authorised override that is recorded and reportable.
- Full, partial and multiple receipts against one order
- Tolerance rules with an audited override path
- Goods received notes feed stock on hand automatically
- Purchase returns and supplier claims tracked to closure
10. Invoice, three-way match & payment
Finance registers the supplier invoice and the system matches it against the purchase order and the goods received note. Only a clean match — or an authorised exception — can be scheduled into a payment run and closed off.
- Automatic three-way match: PO ↔ GRV ↔ invoice
- Exceptions queued for review instead of silently paid
- Payment schedules, payment runs and remittance records
- Requisition closes with a complete, exportable document bundle
Capabilities
Built for the way large organisations actually buy
Thresholds, delegations, tolerances, segregation of duties, compliance gates and budget commitment — the controls auditors ask for, configured by your administrator rather than hard-coded by a developer.
Workflow engine
Design your approval workflow visually — no code, no consultant
Administrators draw the approval graph in a browser: nodes for roles and stages, conditions for value thresholds and departments, and routes for rejection and escalation. The engine stores the graph in the database and every requisition traverses it at runtime.
- Drag-and-drop designer with live validation of the graph
- Value, department, category and account-based routing conditions
- Standing cover and out-of-office delegation built in
- Administrator force-escalation and override, fully audited
- Duration reminders and automatic escalation on stalled approvals
Budget control
Stop the overspend before it happens, not at month-end
Budgets are loaded per department, account and period. As requisitions progress the system shows what is available, what is committed and what is actually spent — and a verification gate stops approval when the money is not there.
- Budget by department × account × period
- Available / committed / actual shown live on the approval screen
- Hard verification gate before executive approval
- Budget utilisation and variance reporting out of the box
- CSV import so you can load next year's budget in minutes
Sourcing & suppliers
Competitive quotes, scored fairly, awarded defensibly
Send one RFQ to many suppliers, receive their pricing online, and compare it in a single grid. Compliance is enforced automatically, so a supplier with an expired tax clearance simply cannot be awarded.
- Supplier register with categories, contacts and banking details
- Compliance documents with expiry dates and automatic blocking
- Weighted evaluation criteria you define per organisation
- Supplier performance scoring fed by delivery and quality history
- Written award justification retained with the requisition forever
Documents & audit
The complete file, assembled automatically
Every requisition carries a document bundle: the original request, approvals, quotes, evaluation, purchase order, goods received note and invoice. Export it as one PDF for auditors, or drill into any single action.
- One-click PDF bundle of the entire purchase history
- Immutable audit trail — who, what, when, from where
- Permission-checked document downloads, no guessable links
- Watchers, comments and @mentions on any requisition
- Retention and archive policies for long-lived records
Reporting
46 reports your finance team will actually use
Every report filters by date, department, supplier, account and status, and exports to Excel, CSV or PDF. Managers get dashboards; auditors get evidence.
- Spend by supplier
- Spend by category
- Spend trend
- Savings analysis
- Account utilisation
- Departmental budget
- Budget verification
- Requisition register
- Requisitions by status
- Requisitions by department
- Requisition ageing
- Pending requisition activity
- Departmental approvals
- Approval bottlenecks
- Cycle time
- Officer workload
- Process map
- Executive queue
- Executive decisions
- Final review activity
- Audit trail
- RFQ activity
- RFQ supplier responses
- Quotation register
- Evaluation register
- Award outcomes
- Purchase order register
- PO approval queue
- PO fulfilment
- Expected deliveries
- Finance PO pipeline
- GRV register
- GRV overrides
- Tolerance exceptions
- Purchase returns
- Stock on hand
- Stock movements
- Stock issued
- Stock requisitions
- Supplier directory
- Supplier compliance
- Supplier performance
- Invoice register
- Outstanding payables
- Payment runs
- Payment schedule items
Supplier portal
Your suppliers get their own front door
Suppliers register themselves, upload compliance documents, respond to RFQs, price line by line, acknowledge purchase orders and track payment status — without a single phone call to your procurement office.
- Self-service registration with document upload and approval
- Secure token links for RFQ responses — no password friction
- Online quotation submission, replacing emailed spreadsheets
- Purchase order acknowledgement and delivery confirmation
- Compliance expiry reminders sent automatically
Security & governance
Enterprise controls, built in from the first line of code
Procurement is where fraud happens. The system is designed on the assumption that someone will try — and that an auditor will ask you to prove they did not.
Role-based access control
Granular permissions per module and action, assigned by role, department level or individually. Users only see what their job requires.
Multi-factor authentication
One-time codes by email and SMS on sign-in, with rate limiting, lockout after repeated failures and forced password rotation policies.
Immutable audit trail
Every create, edit, approval, rejection, override and download is recorded with user, timestamp, IP address and the values that changed.
Segregation of duties
The person who evaluates cannot approve; the person who approves cannot issue; the person who receives cannot pay. Enforced server-side.
CSRF, injection & upload defence
Token verification on every state change, prepared statements throughout, strict input filtering and non-executable, permission-checked file storage.
Backups & continuity
Scheduled database and document backups, retention policies, and a documented restore procedure — tested, not assumed.
Deployment options
Run CatVision Enterprise on your own servers behind your firewall, on a private cloud instance we manage for you, or on shared hosting for smaller sites. The application runs on standard PHP 8 and MySQL — no proprietary runtime, no vendor lock-in, and your data stays in a database you can read.
Integrations
Fits the finance stack you already run
Radical Systems has worked with Sage products for years. CatVision Procurement is built to sit alongside your general ledger rather than fight it — approved orders, receipts and invoices can be exported or pushed to your accounting system.
Sage 200 Evolution
Supplier, account and transaction alignment so approved procurement documents reconcile with the ledger.
Sage Pastel & Sage 50
Export-ready supplier invoices and payment batches in the formats your bookkeeping team already imports.
Sage 300 & Sage X3
Structured document exports and API access for larger, multi-entity finance environments.
CatVision School ERP
Schools and colleges running catvision.co.zw can add procurement without a second supplier database.
REST API (read-only)
JWT-authenticated JSON endpoints for dashboards, data warehouses and BI tools such as Power BI.
Email & SMS
SMTP for notifications, RFQ invitations and one-time codes; SMS gateway support for approvals on the move.
Need something specific — a bespoke ledger export, a bank file format, an integration with an existing in-house system? Tell us what you run and we will scope it.
Comparison
Spreadsheets, generic ERP, or a purpose-built procurement system
| Capability | Email & spreadsheets | Generic ERP module | CatVision Procurement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configurable multi-level approvals | Manual | Consultant required | Visual designer, self-service |
| Budget check before commitment | None | Often an add-on | Built in, hard gate |
| Competitive RFQ to multiple suppliers | Email threads | Limited | Full RFQ & scoring |
| Supplier self-service portal | No | Extra licence | Included |
| Compliance expiry blocking | No | Rarely | Enforced in code |
| Three-way match before payment | Manual | Yes | Automatic with exceptions queue |
| Complete audit bundle as one PDF | Paper file | Partial | One click |
| Implementation time | Immediate but uncontrolled | 6–18 months | Weeks, not quarters |
| Local support & training | None | Offshore | Radical Systems, on the ground |
| Your data, your database | Scattered files | Proprietary | Standard MySQL |
Editions
Licensed by organisation, not by the seat you forgot to remove
Pricing depends on your size, deployment choice and how much of the suite you take. Tell us about your organisation and we will send a written quotation within two working days.
Standard
Single site, one procurement team
- Full procure-to-pay workflow
- Up to 3 approval levels
- Supplier portal & RFQ
- All 46 reports
- Email support, business hours
Enterprise
Multi-department, multi-site organisations
- Everything in Standard
- Unlimited approval levels & thresholds
- Budgets, commitment control & stores
- Multi-factor authentication & SSO-ready
- REST API access
- Priority support with an SLA
Enterprise Plus
Groups, holdings and regulated entities
- Everything in Enterprise
- Multi-entity & multi-currency
- Custom integrations & ledger exports
- Dedicated environment & managed backups
- On-site training and change management
- Named account manager
What implementation looks like
- 01Discovery
We map your current approval chains, departments, accounts and supplier base.
- 02Configuration
Workflow, permissions, budgets and document templates set up to match your policy.
- 03Data migration
Suppliers, cost accounts, product catalogue and opening balances loaded and verified.
- 04Training
Role-based sessions for requesters, approvers, procurement, stores and finance.
- 05Go live
Parallel run, then cutover — with our team on hand during your first month-end.
Client results
What changes in the first quarter
These are the outcomes we plan and measure with every client during implementation. Your baseline is captured in discovery, so improvement is measured, not claimed.
Approval turnaround measured in hours instead of days, because every approver has an inbox and a reminder rather than an email they missed.
Competitive quotes on purchases that used to go to a single familiar supplier — the savings usually cover the licence in the first year.
Auditors receive one PDF bundle per transaction instead of a request for files. Audit preparation stops consuming finance's month-end.
Questions
Frequently asked questions about procurement systems
What is a procurement system?
A procurement system is software that manages how an organisation buys goods and services — from the moment a department requests something, through approval, sourcing quotes from suppliers, issuing a purchase order, receiving the delivery, and finally matching and paying the supplier invoice. Its purpose is control: making sure that every purchase is authorised by the right person, is within budget, is competitively priced where it should be, and leaves an audit trail that can be produced on demand.
What does CatVision Enterprise Procurement do?
It runs the complete procure-to-pay cycle in ten stages: departmental requisition, departmental approval, procurement intake, request for quotation, supplier evaluation, executive approval, procurement final review, purchase order, goods receiving (GRV), and invoice with three-way match and payment. It also includes budget commitment control, a supplier self-service portal, stores and stock management, a configurable workflow designer, 46 built-in reports, and a full audit trail on every action.
How long does implementation take?
Most organisations go live in four to ten weeks. The variables are how many approval chains you need configured, how much supplier and catalogue data has to be migrated, and how many staff need training. A single-site deployment with a straightforward approval structure can be live in under a month; a multi-entity group with data migration from a legacy system takes longer.
Does it integrate with Sage — Evolution, Pastel, 300 or X3?
Yes. Radical Systems works across the Sage product range, and CatVision Procurement is designed to sit in front of your general ledger. Approved purchase orders, goods received notes and supplier invoices can be exported in formats your Sage installation imports, and the read-only REST API allows a direct feed into reporting or middleware. Where a client needs a specific, automated integration we scope and build it as part of the project.
Can suppliers submit their quotations online?
Yes. Suppliers receive an RFQ invitation by email with a secure link, sign in to the supplier portal, and price each line directly. They can also upload compliance documents, acknowledge purchase orders, confirm deliveries and track payment status. Procurement can still capture a walk-in or telephone quotation manually when a supplier is not yet online.
Is it cloud-based or installed on our own servers?
Both options are supported. You can run it on your own servers behind your firewall, on a private cloud instance managed by Radical Systems, or on standard shared hosting for smaller deployments. It runs on PHP 8 and MySQL, so there is no proprietary runtime and no lock-in — your data lives in a database you can query directly.
Can we configure our own approval workflow?
Yes, and without a developer. Your administrator uses a visual workflow designer in the browser to draw the approval graph: who approves at each stage, what value thresholds escalate to executives, how rejections route back, and what happens when an approver is on leave. The graph is stored in the database and applied to every new requisition immediately.
How does the system prevent procurement fraud?
Through several independent controls: role-based permissions with segregation of duties so no one person can request, approve, receive and pay; a budget verification gate before approval; a compliance gate that blocks suppliers with expired statutory documents; mandatory competitive quotes above configurable thresholds; tolerance rules on goods receiving with audited overrides; an automatic three-way match before any invoice can be scheduled for payment; and an immutable audit trail recording every action with user, timestamp and IP address.
How much does CatVision Enterprise Procurement cost?
Licensing is by organisation and edition rather than per named user, so you are not penalised for giving every employee the ability to raise a requisition. The final figure depends on your edition (Standard, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus), whether you deploy on-premise or want a managed instance, and the scope of data migration and training. Request a quote and we will respond in writing within two working days.
Does it handle multiple currencies, entities and locations?
Yes, in the Enterprise Plus edition. Multi-currency purchasing, multiple legal entities with separate approval structures and budgets, and multiple stores or delivery locations are all supported, with consolidated group reporting across them.
Who builds and supports the system?
CatVision Enterprise is designed, built and supported by Radical Systems, an enterprise software company that also produces CatVision School ERP and implements and supports the Sage product range. Support is local, with named engineers who know your configuration.
Can we migrate from spreadsheets or an existing system?
Yes. Data migration is a standard part of implementation. We import your supplier register, cost accounts and chart of accounts, product catalogue, departmental budgets and open purchase orders, then reconcile the imported balances with you before go-live. Historic transactions can be loaded for reporting continuity where the source data allows it.
Get started
See it running on your own numbers
Book a 45-minute demonstration. We will walk a real requisition through approval, RFQ, purchase order, receiving and payment — using your departments and your approval structure, not a canned demo script.
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Call Radical Systems+263 — add your number
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