Buying Information

The information contained in this section will enable authorized faculty and staff to successful fulfill their purchasing requirements in accordance with all University financials polices and guidelines.

About the Buying Process

A formal Buying Decision Chart is available to assist faculty and staff in determining the appropriate buying method for required products and services. The BEN Financials Commodity Matrix provides more specific information pertaining to the appropriate buying method by product or service.

The University's BEN Buys Purchasing System and the Penn Marketplace facilitate a seamless and user friendly online "purchase-to-pay" environment for faculty and staff. As the University's primary buying method, the BEN Buys purchasing system coupled with the Penn Marketplace enables Penn to leverage its considerable buying power and capitalize on its investment in leading edge financial information management and purchasing technologies. Access to the BEN Buys Purchasing System is available to all authorized employees, including faculty, researchers, lab assistants, and administrative staff. An authorized system user can log on to a secure environment, browse-search-select items from a large number of the University's most commonly used preferred contract supplier online catalogs, process an order by creating a requisition, which gets routed, approved and turned into a purchase order electronically through the purchasing system workflow.

The online purchasing system enables users to select items from Penn Marketplace suppliers, and create requisition lines for non-marketplace suppliers in a single shopping session. This one-stop-shopping environment dramatically reduces time and effort required to satisfy purchase requirements. During the process of creating a requisition, account and buyer validation takes place as well as automatic processing for funds checking (availability of funds), identification of hazardous materials and checks to ensure the appropriateness of equipment purchases to be charged to sponsored research.

The University's MasterCard Purchasing Card Program is also available to authorized faculty and staff for the purchase of a limited number of non-restricted products and services from external non-restricted suppliers.