About Reena
Reena is a nonprofit organization that supports people with developmental disabilities through housing, community programs, social engagement, and employment services.
With services delivered across a growing network of locations, purchasing ranges from everyday program supplies to larger facility and contractor expenses. As that footprint grows, consistent workflows, enforced budgets, and clear location-level visibility are essential to keeping purchasing accountable across sites.
Key Products
The challenges
For a multi-site nonprofit, keeping spend controlled and audit-ready became more complex as purchasing volume increased with expanding services and locations. Purchasing and accounts payable weren’t fully aligned, creating visibility gaps and added manual effort.
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Nonprofit spend visibility across locations
While some purchases followed standard workflows, others still happened through corporate cards, petty cash, Amazon, Costco, or Walmart based on price or convenience. This mix made spend harder to track and control across 40+ locations.
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Manual invoice reconciliation and AP workload
Invoices and purchasing lived in different systems, forcing AP to reconcile across multiple tools. Amazon’s per-item invoices and exceptions like USD wire transfers slowed processing, increasing pressure and delay risk under PFR deadlines.
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Contract and vendor visibility gaps
With annual spend in the multi-million-dollar range, vendor and contract visibility became harder to maintain consistently. About 14% of spend was categorized as “Other,” and only 2 of 48 contracts were tied to active POs, making it harder to connect some purchases to negotiated terms.
The solution
Reena implemented Procurify’s procure-to-pay solution to bring purchasing into one structured system, reducing off-system buying, improving location-level visibility, and strengthening spend control as purchasing scaled.
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Unifying purchase requests and approvals across locations
Instead of ad-hoc buying, staff submit requests through a single workflow. Requests route automatically to the right approvers based on rules and spend thresholds, then convert into POs once approved. This creates a consistent approval trail across locations and reduces back-and-forth for requesters and approvers.
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Budget visibility before spend is committed
Budgets were built into the request process so teams could see available funds before submitting a purchase. As a result, spend was reviewed and approved with budget context upfront—not after the fact.
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PunchOut catalogs to keep purchasing consistent
PunchOut catalogs, including Staples Canada, let staff shop in a familiar digital storefront while keeping purchases in the same approval flow. Carts route for approval before checkout, reducing off-system buying and creating cleaner vendor data for reporting.
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Contract visibility and renewal reminders
Contracts were centralized with renewal reminders to make key agreements easier to organize and revisit when needed. This helped simplify renewals and improved access to contract details as purchasing grew
Takeaways
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52% faster approvals
Average request-to-approval time dropped from 100.7 hours to 48.6 hours, helping purchases dramatically move faster while maintaining the controls needed in a multi-location environment.
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Consistent purchasing process
Reena maintains a 98% request-to-PO conversion rate, signalling that requests are being approved and converted into purchase orders instead of being abandoned or happening outside the process.
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Multi-million-dollar spend under one workflow
Reena centralized between $2.5M and $3.0M in spend in one purchasing workflow, making it easier to see where money was going and maintain accountability across locations.
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Improved spend governance
Approximately 7% of purchase orders were flagged and sent back for correction, protecting spend governance across locations.
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Uninterrupted high-value PO support
As purchasing scaled, larger purchases still moved through the same approval process. Average PO value more than tripled, showing the workflow and oversight remained consistent even as spend increased.
