Introduction

Mesh ProcurePay automates the process of issuing a payment method for approved purchase orders (POs). 

Pre Requisites

External to Mesh

Mesh assumes that you have: 

• API access to the ERP or PO management system.
• The ability to identify the PO, the relevant entity, the buyer or requester, and whether the PO should be paid by a credit card.

Mesh API Access 

Reach out to your Mesh Customer Success or Account Manager to secure access to the following resources:

• Credentials to access the Mesh Developers Portal
• A Mesh Staging (i.e., sandbox) environment
• An API user for the Staging environment
• An API user for the Production environment

ProcurePay Flow - Outline 

At a high level, when an employee submits a purchase request, they are automatically assigned a Mesh Card to pay for the purchase order shortly after it is approved. Below is a short outline of the ProcurePay flow, followed by a more detailed description.

• Step 1: Identify an approved PO that should be paid by a Mesh Card - In your procurement system (or ERP), you should have the capability to identify when a purchase order is approved. Additionally, you should be able to determine whether this purchase order should be paid by Mesh.
• Step 2: Identify the target card owner The card owner is the user to whom the issued card should be assigned. You determine a card owner by either assigning the card directly to the PO requester/buyer or submitting the card for additional approval. 
• Step 3: Call the Mesh Issue Card API, with all necessary details. This includes Amount, Expiration, and Custom fields. Once the API call is successfully executed, a Mesh card will be issued for the approved PO.

ProcurePay Flow - Detailed 

Step 1: Identify an Approved PO that should be paid by a Mesh Card

The first step happens externally to Mesh, in your Procurement system or ERP.

Usually, there are two possible ways to stay informed about Approved POs in the procurement system. One option is to receive proactive notifications (for example, by subscribing to Webhooks) when Approved POs are generated. The other option is to periodically query the system every few minutes or hours to retrieve recently approved POs.

To streamline the process, filter the approved purchase orders (POs) specifically for those intended to be paid with a credit card. This is to ensure that cards are issued in Mesh only for these selected POs.

The information that you will most likely need to query from your Procurement system is:

• The PO amount and frequency, for example: $12,000 annually, or $1,000 monthly.
• The PO buyer/requester - the person in your organization that the Mesh card will be assigned to, to make the purchase.
• The PO Expiration - how long is this PO valid for?
• Any accounting fields that will help you code the card transactions for smoother month end, such as PO number, vendor, department, project, etc.

Step 2: Identify the Card Assignee

By default, a Mesh card is issued in this flow with no additional approvals other than the approval that took place during the PR to PO process.

In some cases, organizations may require additional approval before issuing a Mesh Card. For example, if the PO amount is high (for example higher than $50,000 annually)

Does your organization require additional approval before a Mesh card is issued? (e.g. I require an additional approver for any PO with an amount higher than $50,000 annually)

1. If yes, identify the PO Threshold Amount and an Individual in your organization who will be requested to approve the card, Make sure that person has a Mesh user.
2. If no, you can continue to the next item.

Assigning Mesh Cards directly to Employees

To ensure a seamless user experience, in most cases, organizations that issue Mesh cards assign them directly to the buyers/requesters. However, while trying to assign the card to the employee, you may find that the employee has not been added to Mesh as a user yet. In these scenarios, you will need to make an additional API call to add a buyer/requester to Mesh as a user. For that, you will need to:

• Call the getEmployee ( by Email ) API, to check if the buyer was already added as a Mesh user.
• If not, call the addEmployee API to add the employee to Mesh, before assigning the card.

The diagram below summarizes the steps mentioned above:

Step 3: Call Mesh issueCard API 

In this final step, we will guide you through the important fields in the issueCard API that are relevant to this flow. You can find the full documentation in the Mesh developer portal.

Note: Mesh Administrators and API users can update the card's details before it expires, either through the API or the Mesh User Interface. The person to whom the card is assigned can also request a card edit (e.g., increase the amount, change the end date, or assign the card to a new user).

Appendix:

Identify Custom Fields for Card Pre-Coding

One of the main benefits of the flow is the ability to pre-code all issued cards with the relevant accounting fields. This helps with month-end reconciliation. Identify the fields that you want to pre-code to facilitate syncing the expense later to the ERP. Some common examples include:

• PO number
• Vendor
• Department

If you integrated your ERP with Mesh:

Most likely, all of the custom fields mentioned above have already been synced from the ERP into Mesh as part of the ERP integration, and are now available as Custom Fields in Mesh.

If you did not integrate your ERP with Mesh:

If the above fields have not yet been created in your Mesh account, set them up as Custom Fields. This is how Mesh recommends setting up the fields:

Get the Custom Fields respective IDs:

Definition ID refers to the ID of the Custom Field as identified by Mesh. For each custom field you wish to code in the ProcurePay process, get the respective definition ID from your Mesh Account:

• Login as an Admin to your Mesh Account
• Navigate to the Company Settings > Custom Fields
• Click on the relevant Custom Field, and grab the ID from the browser URL bar.