If you’re evaluating procurement software, you’ve likely come across ZipHQ. As a popular intake-to-procure solution, it excels at organizing the front end of the purchasing process: managing requests and routing them for approval. But for many mid-market finance and operations teams, that’s only half the battle. Once a request is approved, your team is often left to navigate a fragmented landscape of vendor websites, manual purchasing, and a flood of invoices that need to be reconciled and paid.

The best ZipHQ alternatives don't just organize purchase requests—they unify the entire procurement workflow automation from requisition and purchasing to fulfillment and payment. While ZipHQ provides a front door for spend requests, a true end-to-end solution manages the whole house. For scaling businesses, the superior alternative is a platform that centralizes every step into a single, automated system, delivering complete spend control and significant operational savings.

This article explores why teams look for ZipHQ alternatives and provides a direct Order.co vs. ZipHQ comparison to help you find the right solution for your business.

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What is ZipHQ and who is it for?

ZipHQ is an intake-to-procure platform designed to give businesses a single front door to initiate any purchase or vendor request. It helps streamline the beginning of the purchasing journey by creating clear, customizable workflows for approvals, ensuring that every request is seen and signed off on by the right stakeholders before any money is spent.

The platform is primarily built for finance, procurement, and IT teams looking to gain control over how purchase requests are made and managed. By centralizing the intake process, ZipHQ helps eliminate chaotic email chains and spreadsheet trackers, providing visibility into requested spend.

However, ZipHQ’s core function is to manage the request, not the entire transaction. After a request is approved in ZipHQ, the employee typically completes the purchase on their own, and the resulting invoices must be processed manually by the accounts payable team. This is a critical distinction for teams seeking true end-to-end spend visibility and automation.

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Learn the key pillars of a strong strategy, valuable procurement metrics to track, and initiatives you can start implementing today.

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Why mid-market teams look for ZipHQ alternatives

Mid-market teams seek ZipHQ alternatives when they need a single, unified platform that manages the entire purchase-to-pay (P2P) lifecycle, not just the initial request and approval stages. As businesses scale, the friction caused by a disconnected procurement process becomes a major bottleneck, leading to rogue spend, invoice overload, and a lack of real control.

Finance and operations leaders quickly realize that approving a request is just one piece of the puzzle. They need a solution that also automates the purchasing, fulfillment, and payment processes to achieve true efficiency and cost savings.

Need for a true end-to-end solution

While ZipHQ organizes the intake process, it leaves the most time-consuming parts of procurement—purchasing and payments—to be handled elsewhere. Your team still has to log in to multiple vendor websites, place orders manually, track shipments, and process every individual invoice. A true end-to-end solution connects every step of the procure-to-pay cycle.

Order.co unifies this entire workflow in a single platform. Employees submit requests, get approvals, and place orders from every company vendor within one guided marketplace. This eliminates the need for teams to jump between systems, providing a seamless experience from requisition to reconciliation.

Lack of control over actual purchasing

A major reason teams look for ZipHQ alternatives is the gap between approving a request and controlling the actual purchase. ZipHQ’s approval workflows ensure a request is compliant, but they don’t stop an employee from buying the wrong item, choosing a non-preferred vendor, or spending more than the approved amount. This uncontrolled buying, or maverick spend, undermines cost-saving initiatives and creates compliance risks.

Order.co solves this by embedding controls directly into the purchasing experience. All company vendors and products are centralized into a single, curated catalog. You can set rules by user, department, or location to ensure employees only purchase pre-approved items within their budgets. Unlike systems that just approve a request to buy, Order.co controls the actual transaction, preventing out-of-policy spend before it ever happens.

Complex invoice and payment management

For an AP team, an intake-only tool doesn't reduce the downstream workload. After a purchase is approved in ZipHQ, the AP department still has to process and pay invoices from hundreds of different vendors. This manual work is inefficient, prone to errors, and makes the month-end close a recurring nightmare.

Order.co eliminates this complexity with its Consolidated Billing feature. Order.co pays your vendors on your behalf for every transaction placed through the platform. At the end of your billing cycle, you receive a single, reconciled invoice for all your purchases. Because all purchases are pre-coded, the data is automatically coded and synced to your ERP, transforming your accounts payable ledger from a source of stress into a streamlined process.

Limited focus on strategic sourcing for physical goods

Many intake management tools are designed with SaaS and services in mind. For businesses with significant indirect spend on physical goods—like office supplies, maintenance equipment, or consumables for multiple locations—these tools miss a major opportunity for cost savings.

Order.co’s platform is built to optimize purchasing for physical goods. The embedded Order.co AI sourcing engine automatically scans a network of over 15,000 vendors to find better prices on the products you buy every day. This AI for sourcing delivers an average of 5% in hard-dollar savings without requiring any manual effort from your team, turning procurement from a cost center into a value driver.

Why Order.co is the best ZipHQ alternative for true end-to-end procurement automation

While both platforms automate procurement workflows, Order.co offers a truly end-to-end solution, unifying purchasing, payments, and spend control within one marketplace. In contrast, ZipHQ focuses mainly on intake and approvals, leaving the rest of the process fragmented across multiple systems. For mid-market companies that have outgrown intake-only tools, Order.co provides the scalability and control needed to manage the entire purchasing lifecycle. By centralizing every vendor and transaction into a guided marketplace, it delivers seamless automation with unmatched efficiency, visibility, and spend control.

Approval workflows

Both Order.co and ZipHQ offer robust, multi-level approval workflows that can be customized based on department, location, budget, and request type. However, the key difference lies in where the approval happens. With ZipHQ, the approval is for a request. With Order.co, the approval is directly tied to the shopping cart, ensuring the exact items and quantities are approved before the purchase is executed within the same platform.

Purchasing experience

After approval, the user experience diverges completely. A ZipHQ user is sent off-platform to make the purchase, opening the door to policy violations and rogue spend. An Order.co user stays within the platform’s guided marketplace to complete their purchase from a pre-approved, unified catalog. This makes clunky vendor punchouts obsolete and provides a frictionless, compliant buying experience for employees.

Spend visibility and control

ZipHQ provides visibility into requested spend, but it loses the trail once the purchase is made off-platform. Order.co provides true end-to-end spend visibility at the line-item level, from the initial request through delivery and final payment. With real-time dashboards, you can track actual spend against budgets and gain actionable insights that generic intake tools can’t offer.

AP automation and invoice management

ZipHQ helps manage vendor information, but your AP team is still left processing a high volume of invoices. Order.co transforms this process. By consolidating all purchases into a single monthly invoice and automating GL coding, Order.co can reduce your invoice volume by up to 50x. It then pushes clean, reconciled invoice data into your ERP to create a bill, saving hundreds of hours in manual AP work.

Strategic sourcing and cost savings

While ZipHQ helps you manage your existing vendors, it doesn’t actively help you save money. Order.co’s strategic sourcing software uses AI to continuously benchmark prices and recommend cost-effective alternatives for the products you buy. This proactive approach to cost savings ensures you’re always getting the best price without the manual work of comparing vendors.

Ebook

The Procurement Strategy Playbook for Modern Businesses

Learn the key pillars of a strong strategy, valuable procurement metrics to track, and initiatives you can start implementing today.

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How to choose the right ZipHQ alternative for your business

Choosing the right alternative to ZipHQ depends on identifying your primary procurement bottleneck. Is your biggest challenge managing the flood of initial requests, controlling what employees actually buy, or simplifying the crushing workload on your AP team?

To find the best fit, ask yourself these questions:

• Where are your biggest process gaps? Are approvals the main issue, or is it the chaos of decentralized purchasing and invoice processing that follows?
• What are your primary spend categories? If you’re purchasing a high volume of physical goods, a platform with a marketplace and sourcing capabilities offers more value than a SaaS-focused tool.
• Do you need to find hard-dollar savings? Look for a solution with features like AI-powered sourcing that actively reduces product costs, rather than just organizing your spend.
• How important is user adoption? A simple, intuitive platform that guides users through a compliant purchasing process will see higher adoption than a complex system that creates more friction.
• What are your integration needs? Ensure the platform integrates seamlessly with your existing ERP and accounting systems like NetSuite, Sage Intacct, or QuickBooks.

Simplify your entire procurement process with Order.co

While intake management tools like ZipHQ solve one part of the procurement puzzle, they leave finance and operations teams struggling with the most painful parts of the process. If your goal is to achieve true spend management and operational efficiency, you need a solution that addresses the entire purchase-to-pay lifecycle.

Order.co is the only platform that unifies procurement, payments, and finance automation in a single system. By moving beyond simple intake to manage the actual purchase and payment, Order.co delivers the control, visibility, and cost savings that growing businesses need to scale with confidence. Stop putting a bandage on a broken process and bring true order to your business buying.

Ready to see how AI-powered procurement can give your business a strategic advantage? Schedule a demo to discover how Order.co can simplify buying for your business.