Last update: June 2025
A strong spend management strategy starts with a simple step: the purchase requisition.
It’s often overlooked, but this internal process lays the foundation for controlling costs, preventing rogue spending, and ensuring purchases are budget-approved before they happen. If you’re still using email or paper forms to request purchases (or worse, letting departments buy without guardrails), it’s time to rethink your approach.
This guide walks through the modern purchase requisition process in 2025, including how automation is helping organizations reduce costs, gain control, and save valuable time.
A purchase requisition is an internal request submitted by an employee to get approval for a purchase. It’s the formal start of a purchasing process, and it's not the same as a purchase order (PO).
Think of the requisition as a checkpoint. Before your organization spends a dime, it validates whether the purchase is necessary, within budget, and compliant with your policies. Once approved, a PO is created and sent to the supplier.
Many mid-sized businesses still rely on email threads or spreadsheets to manage requisitions. But modern organizations are moving to automated systems that often offer built-in customizable workflows, budget checks, and visibility in real-time.
It’s easy to confuse these two terms. Let’s take a look at an example:
A school administrator submits a requisition for new laptops funded by a grant. Once the request is approved and aligned with the grant’s budget and rules, a PO is generated and sent to the vendor.
The requisition initiates the request. The PO executes the purchase.
For a more in-depth comparison, read our blog on purchase request vs purchase order: key differences and tips.
Without a defined process in place, purchasing becomes reactive, and risky. Employees may make purchases without approval, go over budget, or use unapproved vendors. These gaps often lead to:
Businesses that implement a purchase requisition process are able to create clear approval pathways, enforce policy, and enable budget control before money is spent. For industries like education, agriculture, and nonprofits, it’s especially critical:
When spend is controlled from the start, organizations can save money on operational costs through better vendor management, price comparisons, and consolidated purchases. Organizations using automated purchase systems like Fraxion cut approval times in half and reduce spend by up to 20%.
While the specifics may vary depending on your industry or internal policies, these steps form the backbone of a modern, well-managed process:
The process begins when an employee identifies the need for goods or services and submits a purchase requisition. This form typically includes:
In a purchasing system like Fraxion, this step can be completed in minutes using a guided digital form, with fields configured to your company’s specific data and documentation requirements.
Once submitted, the requisition enters an approval chain based on rules you define, such as cost thresholds, department roles, or project types.
Automated routing ensures the requisition reaches the right people without any delay or manual handoffs. Approvers can review supporting documents, ask for clarification, or approve directly from their inbox or mobile device.
Before a purchase can move forward, the request must be validated against internal policies and budget availability. Automated requisition tools instantly:
This step protects your organization from overspending and helps maintain audit-ready compliance.
Once approved, the requisition automatically triggers the creation of a purchase order. This PO is sent to the vendor and serves as a legally binding agreement for the goods or services requested.
With an integrated system, there’s no need to re-enter data. Everything flows from requisition to PO, reducing risk of error and time spent on manual work.
Every step of the process (submission, edits, approvals, budget checks, and PO generation), is time-stamped and documented. This creates a complete digital audit trail that:
Look for a purchasing tool that lets you see the entire purchase lifecycle at a glance, so your finance team has full transparency over organizational spend.
One of the biggest frustrations in any purchasing process is waiting for approvals. But automation helps you move faster without sacrificing control. This is what it looks like in practice:
Case in point: Monson Fruit reduced their approval process from months to minutes by switching to Fraxion. Read the case study to learn how they gained visibility into department-level spend and cut approval delays that were impacting seasonal operations.
A manual, inconsistent purchase requisition process is manual or inconsistent, leads to delays that stack up, increasing costs, and uncontrollable rogue spend. And by the time finance gets visibility, the money’s already gone.
Fraxion changes that with automated requisition workflows, real-time budget checks, and built-in compliance controls. Finance teams across different industries are already using Fraxion to cut costs and reduce operational waste by up to 20%.
Don’t wait for the next budget overrun. Book a Fraxion demo today and take the first step toward proactive spend management.
A purchase requisition is an internal document submitted by an employee to request approval for a purchase. It kicks off the procurement process by validating the need for goods or services before a purchase order (PO) is issued. Requisitions help organizations control costs, enforce policy compliance, and ensure spending is approved before it happens.
Fraxion automates the entire purchase requisition workflow, from request submission to PO creation. It eliminates the use of emails and spreadsheets by routing requests to the right approvers, applying budget and policy checks, and logging every step for auditability. Approvals happen faster, compliance is enforced automatically, and teams gain full visibility into spend before it occurs.
Most mid-sized organizations can implement Fraxion in just a few weeks. The platform is cloud-based with no hardware requirements, and our onboarding team provides hands-on support throughout setup, training, and configuration. Your team can start approving purchases faster without a heavy IT lift.
Fraxion is built for mid-sized businesses across industries like education, agriculture, healthcare, and nonprofits. Finance leaders benefit from faster approvals, improved budget control, and enforced compliance. With Fraxion, purchasing becomes proactive, predictable, and aligned with financial goals across the organization.
Fraxion integrates seamlessly with over 50 major ERP and accounting platforms. It ensures accurate data transfer between systems, reduces duplicate entry, and maintains consistent GL coding. Whether you're using Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks, or other popular tools, Fraxion helps create an end-to-end procurement and AP process with complete visibility.