One-Off Orders: The Process Costs More Than the Goods

For half of all orders, the traditional process costs more than the goods

The median order value at Pedlar was €386 in the first quarter of 2026 and €370 in the second quarter. The basis is the orders from companies that handle their one-off requirements through Pedlar. In both quarters, half of all orders were therefore worth less than €390.

A single one-off order costs around €500 in process costs on average. Most of that comes from creditor creation and invoice review. This figure describes the traditional process with your own supplier onboarding, not an order through Pedlar.

At around €500 per order, at least every second one-off order costs more to process than the goods that are eventually delivered.

At a Glance

• The median order value at Pedlar was below €400 in the first half of 2026, while a one-off order in the traditional process costs around €500 in process costs on average.
• One-time vendor accounts and corporate credit cards barely lower the costs, they shift them into other departments where nobody sees the total.
• You can pull the number of creditors with exactly one invoice per year from your ERP today, and it is the most robust figure for your business case.

Why these costs never show up in a budget

Procurement teams spend, on average, almost three-quarters of their time on operational processing instead of strategic procurement. That is the finding of the Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2021. Even so, the effort for one-off orders does not appear in any budget as a separate line item.

The reason lies in how the work is spread out. Part of it falls to procurement, part to master data, part to accounting and part to the department that had the requirement. Each function sees only its own piece, and each piece looks small on its own. Every individual order ties up buyer capacity in processing, which takes time away from negotiations, supplier development and strategic categories.

Who ends up paying the €500

Four routes have become established for one-off requirements, and for each of them it is worth asking: who pays the €500? The usual shortcuts barely lower the costs. They shift them to another department, and that is exactly why they look cheap: whoever chooses the route never receives the bill for it.

A new supplier onboarding every time. Procurement and master data pay here. Supplier onboarding often takes two to six weeks, and with every one-off requirement the creditor base grows by another entry that is rarely needed again.

One-time vendor account (CPD account). The costs land in accounting. There is no onboarding, but instead someone enters the supplier data by hand for every invoice and checks it individually. Procurement saves time, accounting loses it again with every single invoice, and as a cost block nobody notices it at month end.

Corporate credit card. Budget owners and accounting carry the effort. Ordering is quick, but receipts have to be collected, transactions reconciled and expenses assigned to cost centers after the fact, usually by someone who was not involved in the purchase at all. Whoever is responsible for the budget often sees the expense only at month end.

Single Creditor Model. The effort arises only once. The company sets up a service provider as a creditor once, and from then on every one-off requirement runs through this existing creditor. Pedlar takes care of ordering, payment, delivery coordination and complaints, and issues one invoice per order.

The number you can pull from your ERP today

The €500 is an average, and an average is easy to challenge in any internal budget round. A more robust figure is one you can collect yourself in an afternoon: the number of creditors that issued exactly one invoice in the past year.

Here is how to do it:

1. Export the incoming invoices of the last twelve months from your ERP system or from accounts payable.
2. Count the invoice documents per creditor.
3. Filter for creditors that were created in the same period, so that annual suppliers such as insurers drop out. Check creditors from the last few weeks individually, because they may be new regular suppliers.
4. Count separately the supplier names on the one-time vendor account and the merchants on the credit card statements that appear only once in the same period.
5. Express the number from step 3 as a share of your total creditor base.

Every creditor from step 3 was a complete supplier onboarding for a single order. This number comes from your own system. Nobody in controlling has to take an average on trust.

This gives you a business case with three lines: the number of these one-off creditors, their share of the total creditor base and the one-off suppliers from step 4. If you also multiply the number of all one-off orders by around €500, you have an order of magnitude for the process costs. With the Single Creditor Model, these costs fall by up to 85%.

How companies get started in practice

At Pedlar, a working relationship rarely begins with a project. It usually starts with a single urgent order that the catalog does not cover and the in-house team cannot handle. That one order runs through the new creditor, and further orders follow on their own, without procurement having to set anything up again.

77% of customers order every month. Many corporate groups later add further group companies without needing a new sales conversation. Aurubis, DEUTZ and Lufthansa handle their one-off requirements this way today. For the business case, this means: the first step is a single order through the new creditor, against which you measure the difference from your current process.

Find out how the Single Creditor Model lowers your process costs for one-off purchases: Book a call →