Keep your supplier registry clean. How you interact with the world is a very important aspect of your business. Regardless of industry, one of the keys to your success is how you handle your relationship with your business partners and vendors.
You should keep an eye on the relationships you have with your suppliers. These suppliers are a critical component of any business, playing a significant role in allowing you to manage risks, cash flow, and costs.
But every business should also be careful when dealing with its suppliers. Keeping your supplier registry clean is one of the best ways to efficiently, and preventively, handle issues that may come up in accounts payable, such as invoice disputes, issues with data clarity, and payment details. The supplier registry is an important tool to sustain a smooth finance process, prevent fraud, and ensure contract compliance.
A clean registry will also help prevent errors on your end. Missed or duplicate payments and similar errors usually stem from a poorly managed supplier registry. Keeping an eye on your suppliers helps you avoid credit risks and potential insolvency.
How do you keep your supply registry clean, organized, and useful? Here are three tips to help you get more out of your supplier registry.
1. Only track active suppliers
A useful supplier registry is one that only contains information that’s currently relevant to your business. Keeping records of past transactions is important, but you shouldn’t keep inactive business partners in your registry. Instead, your supplier registry should only keep track of active suppliers. You can always reactivate existing suppliers if they start doing business with you again.
What qualifies a supplier as active isn’t standardized between businesses either. You should examine your supplier registry and come up with your own criteria that a supplier must meet to stay active. Once you’ve defined what makes an active supplier—start removing inactive entries to keep your supplier registry organized.
2. Keep entries accurate and up to date
Incorrect entries are another common issue with supplier registries. The purpose of a supplier registry is to give you easy access to the information you need to run your business efficiently, so keeping the entries accurate is crucial. Make sure you frequently check your supplier registry for errors to keep it useful.
Inaccurate data is not always caused by human error. One common source of inaccurate entries is that correct information changes over time. Remember, your supplier registry isn’t doing you any good if the data it contains isn’t up to date. Keep track of your suppliers’ updated payment details and add them to the registry as necessary to maintain better data accuracy.
3. Watch for duplicates
Almost every supplier registry suffers from duplicate entries. This error is likely to crop up if your supplier registry isn’t clean, as a formerly inactive supplier is added to the registry again. You may have the same supplier registered under multiple names, the oldest of which will have outdated payment details.
It’s important to spot duplicates and remove the incorrect entries as soon as possible. Duplicate entries can lead to duplicate payments, which will take valuable company time to untangle. Another problem with duplicate entries is that data in one or more of the entries is often outdated, adding even more confusion.
Removing duplicate entries is a relatively painless process that can significantly improve your supplier registry.
Keep your supplier registry clean with the right automation tools
Managing your supplier registry correctly is an important task for any organization. Qvalia’s accounts payable automation platform is the ultimate tool for companies that want to exercise better visibility and control over their finance departments.
With our novel feature Supplier Manager, you’ll ensure that every aspect of your supplier record is managed, updated, and monitored automatically.
Are you interested in learning more about how you can improve your supplier registry? Download our free ebook today.