Vendors and how they are onboarded are an interesting topic for our ongoing procure-to-pay discussion. For many organizations, accounts payable departments fall under finance in supply chain, while purchasing falls under materials management. One commonality between these two is the vendors used and how they are onboarded. Sometimes, this depends on which industry you're operating in. For example, if you are a government agency it is likely that you must undertake different types of checks for vendors as you're onboarding them for items such as W-9 and TIN information. This can be very tedious to perform, but the truth is it can be almost completely automated nowadays!
Managing vendor pay-to locations is another thing that we're working towards with RPI’s Yoga Content vendor portal and invoicing automation solution. In a P2P solution, each vendor is a linchpin between supply chain and accounts payable. They both have “skin in the game” in terms of how important the vendor is because you cannot perform vendor cleanup or address issues with the vendor master without including both AP and purchasing.
Purchasing needs to know who they're purchasing from, that they're a valid vendor, and their item catalogs. AP needs to know that they're not paying fraudulent vendors, among other things. Due to this, and the number of stakeholders involved, the vendor portal is an area that deserves a lot of attention as part of any comprehensive AP solution.
As many organizations have experienced, it usually takes a long time for someone to call AP customer service to check on the status of an invoice, because someone generally has to go track down the information manually. Vendor Portal solutions allow vendors to log in and check the status of each invoice, submit new invoices, and update their payment information, all of which can be huge cost savers, especially in the long term.
Hopefully, all of the above helps you to understand how powerful and helpful Vendor Portals can be. Please join us next week as we continue this topic!
