Coupa released its annual Total Spend Management Benchmark Report this year. It's built from data Coupa's own customers share back with the company: more than 10 million buyers and suppliers, and roughly $8 trillion worth of spending, as of when the report was published. Coupa's own Q4 FY26 results have since put that number at $9.5 trillion. The report tracks 20 measures across the whole buying process, from picking a supplier to paying an invoice.

Two of those measures are about contracts: how long they take to sign, and how much of a company's spending actually happens under one.

How Long Contracts Take to Sign

The first measure is how many days pass between asking for a contract and getting it signed. Among Coupa's best-performing customers, the middle result is 11.3 business days. That's not an average across everyone, just the top group. A slow contract has a real cost: a company can end up working with a new supplier before the paperwork protecting it, like liability terms and agreed pricing, is actually in place.

Coupa points to a handful of things that speed this up: getting contracts out of separate, disconnected systems and onto one shared platform; connecting contract terms to what the company already knows about a supplier's risk from its sourcing process; and using AI to suggest standard contract language, summarize long documents, and pull out key details automatically instead of someone reading the whole thing. It also points to simpler intake forms, so an employee can kick off a contract request themselves instead of it going through a legal team's queue first.

How Much Spending Happens Under Contract

The second measure is what share of a company's purchases happen under an existing contract, instead of being bought one-off with no agreement in place. Among top performers, that's 81.1%. Coupa ties this to two habits: negotiating good contracts by category in the first place, and building those contract terms directly into the purchasing process, so the agreed price and terms apply automatically instead of someone having to renegotiate each time. Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company, says 99% of its sourcing and 100% of its contract work already happens digitally. A separate example in the report, Denmark's largest retail group, has 99% of its spending under contract.

Coupa's AI tools are what tie these two numbers together. Contract Intelligence, SpendGuard, and the Coupa Navi assistants check for risk as it happens, pull key terms out of contracts automatically, and flag when something being purchased is already covered by an existing agreement. That's what closes the gap between having a contract and actually using it, which is usually why companies fall short of 100%.

That contract-reading work builds on something this site already covered: Coupa's purchase of Rossum, the tool that takes messy contract and invoice documents, in whatever format or language they arrive in, and turns them into clean data Coupa's AI can actually use. And the automatic matching that boosts on-contract spending is the same problem Coupa's purchase of Tonkean was meant to solve: getting different AI tools to hand work to each other instead of each one stopping at the edge of its own job. The contract-speed gains in this report are a result of that bigger set of tools working together.

Why This Matters to the Bottom Line

McKinsey & Company research cited in the report found that companies with the most mature purchasing operations carry profit margins at least five percentage points higher than companies that are behind. Coupa connects that finding to its own maturity scorecard, which it offers CFOs and finance leaders as a starting point for figuring out where to invest next, including in contract management.

Put simply, these two contract measures show that contracts are no longer treated as their own separate task. They're part of the same connected system that also handles finding suppliers, processing invoices, and paying bills, and Coupa is measuring them with the same seriousness.

Coupa. The Annual Total Spend Management Benchmark Report: KPIs for the Leading AI Platform for Total Spend Management. Coupa, 2025.

McKinsey & Company. "Where Procurement Is Going Next." McKinsey & Company, July 2024.

Shashi Bellamkonda, Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group · Former Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University, Entrepreneur in Residence, Stony Brook University, NY