Vendor Onboarding 101: How to Build a More Secure and Compliant Process

Top 3 Take-Aways from Our Live Event with AP Guru, Debra R. Richardson

We recently had the pleasure of talking to Debra R. Richardson, LLC., who is using her 20+ years of experience in AP, AR, general ledger and financial reporting for Fortune 500 companies to help AP teams implement authentication

techniques, internal controls and best practices to prevent fraud in the vendor master file. She also has a weekly blog and hosts the podcast: “Putting the AP in hAPpy”.

The 2021 numbers are in... and fraudsters are still gonna fraud.

Both the Association of Financial Professionals 2022 Payments Fraud and Controls Survey and the FBI's Internet Crime Report for 2021 recently published, and while there were no big surprises, there were a couple of points that are worth pondering.

Think your bank account verification process confirms ownership? Think again.

How procurement and finance departments verify banking information generally falls into these three buckets:

1. Collecting a voided check or account info on bank letterhead
2. Calling the vendor to confirm the change
3. Multi levels of internal approvals for changes

All of these seem, on the surface, to be solid, but are not infallible in defending the vendor master from infiltration by fraudsters.  If your organization is relying on any of these three ways to ensure the validity of your vendor master file's banking info, you are likely leaving holes wide enough for a fraudster to walk right in. 

Let’s break each one down:

As promised, we have our ‘counterpoint’ to last week’s blog. This week it’s your turn AP!  There is so much you can learn from your peers in procurement. I cannot wait to dive in!  (Side note: finding just the right image in stock art kept me up late last night.  Please enjoy this wonderful team huddle.)

At PaymentWorks we love Procurement and AP equally. We have amazing champions and customers in both areas, and our platform has strategic benefits to both functions.  Yet, we are constantly surprised that these two seemingly made-for-each-other departments don't always appreciate all they do in support of each other.

So we thought we'd take a stab in this two part series at playing 'counselor' to this couple, and walk through just how much they could learn from each other.

Let's begin.

In the course of building our network and our platform, we did what product people do: we talked to the market.  When it comes to the risk associated with vendor onboarding, everyone we spoke to was united.  However, when it came to how to solve it, consensus was elusive. Vendor management, AP and Procurement personnel know they should not trust banking information that arrives via email.  That is a given. To solve this most seem to focus verifying vendor banking information.  But what, exactly, does that mean?

How banking information gets 'verified', generally falls into these three buckets:

1. Collecting a voided check or account info on bank letterhead
2. Calling the vendor to confirm the change
3. Multi levels of internal approvals for changes

All of these seem, on the surface, to be solid, but are not infallible in defending the vendor master from infiltration by fraudsters.  The devil, as they say, is in the details. If your organization is relying on any of these three ways to ensure the validity of your vendor master file's banking info, you are likely leaving holes wide enough for a fraudster to walk right in.

Julie-Anne White isn't going to argue that having a clean vendor master file is more important to a company than generating sales and growing revenue. (Because it isn't.)

But that doesn't mean the financial industry veteran thinks companies should penny pinch by failing to devote resources to vendor management. (Because they shouldn't.)

We interviewed Julie-Anne on the importance of accurate vendor information for our Risky Business podcast.  You can listen to the entire interview here.

"I feel as if I am holding a hand grenade with the pin pulled."

This is an actual quote from one of our customers, before she was a customer.  We hear versions of this all of the time when we speak to prospects. People are scared. 

Wendy Grayauskie, Assistant Director for Procurement at Villanova University, and Miguel Silva, Procurement Assistant for CSU Monterey Bay, joined us for the 4th installment of our podcast: PaymentWorks Presents Risky Business. 

Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation where they discuss how the title of this blog is what keeps them up at night. You can listen to the full podcast here.

Mistakes are going to happen in any business, at least any business that involves humans. There really isn’t any way around that. 

While it would be wonderful to eliminate the scourge of mistakes completely, that just isn't realistic. The goal, instead, should be to minimize exposure to risks while decreasing the high costs that come with onboarding and maintaining your vendor master. And make no mistake, the costs are indeed high. Benchmarking among our customer base indicates it costs $100-200 to onboard and maintain each of your vendors, each and every year you keep them on your vendor master!  

We have five ways your vendor master is costing you money, along with some practical advice on how to keep those costs down.