Onboarding a supplier without the twelve-email document chase

Onboarding was an email thread. A buyer sent a vendor pack as attachments, the supplier returned some of it, and the buyer chased the rest. Tax clearance certificates, transformation certificates, letters of good standing, injury-fund registration, banking confirmation and company registration documents arrived in different formats over several weeks.

Once filed, nobody tracked their expiry, so the group routinely transacted with suppliers whose documents had lapsed. Risk assessment, where it happened, was a judgement call written in an email. Duplicate vendors were created because nobody checked the register first, and banking detail changes arrived by email and were actioned on trust.

The buyer sends one link. The supplier completes their own details and uploads their own documents, and the form will not submit while a mandatory document is missing — which moves the chasing to the party who actually holds the paperwork.

Each document is captured with its expiry date, and the system reminds the supplier before it lapses. The risk questionnaire scores across financial standing, health and safety capability, ethics and anti-bribery, transformation credentials and insurance cover; the score plus the spend category determines who has to approve, so a low-risk stationery supplier does not follow the same path as a contractor working at height on a live plant. Approved records screen against the existing vendor master before creation, and any later change to banking details re-enters a verification workflow.