Introducing Purchase Orders for Airwallex Spend

A few Slack messages. A verbal “yeah, go for it.”

Weeks later, a $50,000 invoice lands in your inbox completely unplanned, and completely over budget.

No PO. No approval. No heads-up. Just spend that’s already happened, and a finance team scrambling to explain where the money went.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. At a certain point in a company’s growth, what used to work – message threads, shared spreadsheets, and informal approvals – starts to break. The cracks show up as budget overruns, surprise invoices, and forecasts you can’t trust.

That’s why we built Purchase Orders for Airwallex Spend: a smarter, simpler way to bring structure and control to company spend before it happens, especially for teams new to the purchase order process.

When spend starts before finance is in the loop

As companies scale, they tend to hit the same friction point, just in different ways.

Fast-moving teams often start with no real procurement process at all. Budgets exist, but approvals happen ad hoc. Someone messages a VP for a quick thumbs-up. A vendor is onboarded. A large contract gets signed. And finance only learns about it when the invoice shows up – long after the money’s been spent.

Without a structured intake process, even well-meaning teams can spend tens of thousands with no paper trail. Finance is left chasing approvals after the fact, and teams are blindsided when budgets unexpectedly run dry.

More established companies often have the opposite issue: they’ve put a process in place, but it’s so clunky and painful that employees actively avoid it. Legacy PO systems buried in ERP menus, multi-step approval chains, and confusing fields make it tempting for employees to bypass the system than follow it. And so they do, leaving finance to play compliance police.

When POs become a punishment, not a process, people stop following them. You end up with spend scattered across systems, teams going rogue, and finance constantly cleaning up after the fact.

Airwallex Purchase Orders: proactive control without the complexity

Airwallex Purchase Orders are built for exactly this moment; when companies need more control, but can’t afford to implement a heavyweight system that no one wants to use.

Here’s how it works:

Request and approve purchases before the invoice ever lands

• Employees can easily submit purchase requests (no training needed)

• Set up smart approval flows by amount, department, or vendor

• Full audit trails give finance total visibility at every step

Let automation do the heavy lifting

• AI-powered OCR reads and extracts invoice data instantly

• Match invoices to POs in just a few clicks

• Skip the Slack searches and email chains

Stay in sync with NetSuite

• Sync POs approved in Airwallex over to NetSuite

• Import POs from NetSuite into Airwallex

One platform for every step – from request to payment

Here’s where Airwallex Spend is different: Most tools stop at PO creation. We go all the way through to global payment and reconciliation, all from one unified platform.

Because we own the entire payment infrastructure, you can:

• Pay vendors in over 150 countries

• Access market-leading FX rates, no matter your transaction size

• Settle invoices as fast as one business day

• Track committed and actual spend side-by-side

This isn’t just procurement, it’s spend control, built for global finance teams.

And when that visibility is missing, the cost isn’t just operational, it’s financial.

Imagine a team thinking they’ve got $100k left in the budget, unaware that a PO is still 80% unbilled. When the final invoice arrives, they’re over budget, forecasts are off, and finance is left cleaning up a shortfall that could have been avoided.

These aren’t one-off mistakes, they’re symptoms of disconnected systems and siloed data. Airwallex brings everything into one view, so you can see what’s committed, what’s been billed, and what’s still coming before it impacts your bottom line.

From global payments to full spend control

If you already use Airwallex for payments, Purchase Orders unlock a new layer of visibility and precision.

Spend isn’t just processed, it’s proactively managed, from the moment a request is submitted to the moment the vendor is paid.

What began as a powerful global payments platform now supports the entire lifecycle of spend, request, approval, payment, and reconciliation, on a single global system.

Whether you're:

• Putting your first formal process in place

• Replacing outdated tools that employees have outgrown

• Or bringing visibility and control to global, multi-entity operations

This is how you bring order to the chaos.