Coupa Glossary

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Overview

This glossary covers terms commonly used by Coupa to explain our product and services.

2-way match: Purchase order and invoice are received and in agreement. This may be required before payment is made.
3-way match: A purchase order, invoice, and receipt of goods are received and in agreement. This may be required before payment is made.
Account: The place where the money for a line on an order or invoice is coming from. Usually related to a specific budget.
Accounts payable: Accounts payable are debts that must be paid off within a given period of time to avoid default. Sometimes referred to as payables.
Accounts receivable: Money customers still owe to a business for products or services rendered.
Advance ship notice: A document that states the date of a pending delivery and a description of what is in the shipment.
AP: Accounts payable.
AP hold: When an owed payment is delayed before being credited to an account.
Approval: When expense reports, requisitions, or similar documents are officially accepted as satisfactory.
Approval chain: The series of stakeholders who must approve an action before it is carried out.
Approver: A Coupa user role for someone who approves expense reports, requisitions, or similar documents.
Archive invoice: For customers that use integrated archiving provided by Trustweaver, this means those invoices go into the Trustweaver archive.
ASN: Advance ship notice.
Asset tag: Label with barcodes that can be easily scanned to take an inventory of assets.
Backorder: When a customer's order cannot be immediately filled because an item is currently not in stock or is not yet available.
Bill-to address: The address where you send an invoice.
Booking hold: An invoice status for when information is missing from the invoice, such as a verified remit-to address.
BPO: Business process outsourcing, is the contracting of a specific business task, such as payroll, accounting, or HR, to a third-party service provider.
BTA: Bill-to address.
BSM: Business Spend Management.
Business process outsourcing: BPO is the contracting of a specific business task, such as payroll, to a third-party service provider. Usually, BPO is implemented as a cost-saving measure for tasks that a company requires but does not depend upon to maintain their position in the marketplace.
Cart: Refers to an open requisition inside of Coupa.
Catch weight: Scenario in which a distributor stocks an item according to an inventory UOM, such as a case, and prices the item according to a unit price UOM, such as pounds or kilograms.
Chart of accounts: A grouping of accounts for a class of items or organization.
COA: Chart of accounts.
Compliance: The process by which a company ensures that business practices (hiring, invoicing, etc.) meet local regulatory guidelines.
CaaS: Compliance-as-a-Service.
Compliant invoice: The solution provided by Coupa to handle country-specific invoice content checks on supplier-created invoices across a list of supported countries in addition to the solution around AP automation.
Compliant invoicing: Invoicing that meets the regulatory compliance rules for a specific region.
CSO: Coupa Sourcing Optimization
CSP: Coupa Supplier Portal (formerly known as Coupa Supplier Network - CSN)
CSV: Comma separated values. Only use to describe a file type. When describing the method, use flat file instead.
cXML: cXML (commerce eXtensible Markup Language) is a protocol, created by Ariba in 1999, intended for communication of business documents between procurement applications, e-commerce hubs and suppliers. cXML is based on XML and provides formal XML schemas for standard business transactions, allowing programs to modify and validate documents without prior knowledge of their form.
Cycle count: A cycle count is an inventory auditing procedure, which falls under inventory management, where a small subset of inventory, in a specific location, is counted on a specified day.
Deployment: The part of Coupa's cloud infrastructure that hosts the Coupa instances for many different organizations across the globe.
DPO: Days payable outstanding. A company's average payable period. Days payable outstanding tells how long it takes a company to pay its invoices from trade creditors, such as suppliers.
DUNS number: A unique nine digit identification number, for each physical location of your business. Number assignment is free for all businesses required to register with the US Federal government for contracts or grants.
e-invoice: For compliant invoicing purposes, an invoice that has been sent through the CSN, a supplier actionable email, cXML or flat file integration, or the invoice inbox.
e-procurement: E-procurement is the business-to-business purchase and sale of supplies and services over the Internet.

EDI: Electronic Data Interchange. A system used to communicate business and financial transactions between parties. EDI usually takes the form of direct transactions between computers, databases and order systems.
elearning: Online delivery of educational materials, especially in a Learning Management System (LMS).
ERP: Enterprise resource planning
Flat file: A flat file is a file containing records that have no structured relationship. Use when describing an integration or import method. Use CSV when describing the type of file.
Fiscal representative: This is commonly used when you are registered for tax in a country which you are not incorporated in, for example, you are a UK entity with French VAT ID but no French address. Your fiscal representative represents you towards French tax authorities. You must show this on invoices in some countries.
GAAP: Generally accepted accounting principles
General Ledger (GL): Sometimes called "Books", this is list of a company's transactions sorted by chart of accounts and then accounts.
Group purchasing organization (GPO): An entity created to help businesses obtain discounts from vendors by leveraging the collective purchasing power of its buyer members.
HIPAA: Abbreviation of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Hybrid cloud: A combined form of private clouds and public clouds in which some critical data resides in the enterprise’s private cloud while other data is stored in and accessible from a public cloud.
Instance: A customer-specific version of Coupa that's hosted on a deployment. Customers typically have a production instance and a test instance.
Inventory let down: Unpacking items from unit of measure (UOM) to become another UOM. For example, unpacking 1 crate of wine bottles to become 12 bottles of wine. The first UOM is 1 crate. The second UOM is 12 bottles.
Invoice presentation: The feature in Compliant Invoicing used to control the country-specific rules per supported country.
Invoicing: The solution by Coupa to automate AP processing across all invoices.
Legal invoice: An invoice, in digital signed PDF format, automatically generated by Coupa, using the invoice presentation, on behalf of the supplier who sent it. Required for global invoicing compliance.
Management hierarchy: The authority chain of the company's management group.
Master data: The business objects which are agreed on and shared throughout the enterprise.
On-hand balance: The physical quantity or amount that can actually be counted in storage.
P2O: Procure to order
P2P: Procure to pay
P-card: Purchase card.
Par level: The average quantity of stock for an item. Used mainly by restaurants who know in a given week they will need, for example, 2 cases of cheese, so if they have half a case, they would most likely want to order 2 more.
Pending approval: This status shows that the customer is in the process of receiving the goods/services into their system. Once the customer enters the receipt, the invoice will be matched against it. The customer, who owns the invoice process, now your invoice in their queue.

Pending receipt: Displays the status for items that have yet to be received.

Pick list: Indicates which items should be taken from your inventory to fulfill orders.
Procurement: The act of obtaining goods or services from outside sources.
Punchout: A type of supplier catalog that allows a user to leave Coupa and visit the supplier's website, add items to their cart, and then return them back to Coupa for approval.
Purchase order: This document is a legal offer made by a buyer to purchase products or services from a seller. The document lists the types, quantities and prices of the products or services the seller will provide if the seller accepts the offer.
Receipt: A record indicating that a product or service has been received or performed.
Remit-to address: The address the vendor provides to send payments.
Reverse auction: A reverse auction is a type of auction in which the roles of buyer and seller are reversed. In an ordinary auction (also known as a forward auction), buyers compete to obtain a good or service by offering increasingly higher prices. In a reverse auction, sellers compete to win the business by offering increasingly lower prices.
Reverse charge (VAT): The Reverse Charge moves the responsibility for the reporting of a VAT transaction from the seller to the buyer of a good or service. This reduces the requirement for sellers to register for VAT in the country where the supply is made.
RFI: Request for information
RFP: Request for proposal
RFQ: Request for quotation
RTA: Remit-to address
Sandbox refresh: The act of copying data from a customer's live production instance to their test (sandbox) instance.
Ship-to address: The address where a purchased item will be shipped.
SOW: Statement of work.
Spot bid: One-time purchase of services/items.
STA: Ship-to address
SIM: Supplier Information Management
Ultimate approver: A pre-designated exception-handling approver (typically a Coupa Admin) the system can default to when there's identifiable approver for a business object.
Unit of measure: A description of how something is measured.
UOM: Unit of measure
Value-added tax: A tax model where every company acts as a tax collector on goods and services sold, while paying taxes on purchases, and then settling with the tax authorities to balance taxes collected with taxes paid.
VAT: Value-added tax
Unbacked invoice: Invoice that isn't backed by a purchase order.
UNSPSC: The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code is a numbering system for use in e-commerce. UNSPSC codes are eight digits long.
VMI: Vendor managed inventory. Many companies outsource ordering and inventory for direct materials to their suppliers.