Vendor Information
To do business with a vendor, you must have information. Vendor onboarding is the time to gather and validate the particular information you need.
All organizations require the same basic information. Likewise, everyone must do certain validations. But some information requirements and validations depend on your organization type and perhaps even on your customer type. What is your charter? Commerce? Health care? Education? Government? There may be particular information needs you have or validations you must do those others don’t.
If you are in health care, for example, and receive funds from federal health care programs, you must check vendors against the List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE) of the Department of Health and Human Services. You may be a private company doing business with the government. If so, in addition to the basics, you may need to know if your vendors have certain business statuses. Maybe your organization is small—your information item list might be smaller too.
Following is a comprehensive list of items of vendor information that includes the basics along with some that are specific to certain types of organizations:
- Vendor name
- Business name if different (DBA)
- Parent/subsidiary relationship(s)
- Ownership, principal owner
- Address: street, city, state, zip, country
- Address: post office box
- Phone
- Fax
- Email address
- Website URL
- DUNS number
- License / Certification
- Contact person
- Contact phone – office/cell
- Purchase order address
- Remit-to address
- Limits & restrictions (minimum/maximum)
- Payment information: Bank name
- Payment information: Bank routing number
- Payment information: Bank account number
- Payment information: Account type
- Payment Terms (including discount terms/dates)
- Freight Terms
- Tax ID Number (FEIN, SSN, ITIN)
- Tax Classification (Corporation, Partnership, Sole Proprietor)
- Forms W-9, W-8, 8233
- Special Business Status (MBE, WBE, etc.)
- Special Business Status Certificate
- Commodity or Industry Code
- Critical Supplier Designation
- Other Custom Designator
- Contract
- GL Number(s)
- Sales tax status designation
Did we miss anything? Send an email to rrogers@philb36.sg-host.com!
These are the items you need to gather from vendors and keep current. You have probably tailored your new-vendor-information form to gather the basics and the particulars you need. But if you are gathering the information through a combination of emails, phone calls and even snail mail, there is a better way. To learn how VendorInfo can tailor an electronic vendor information collection suited exactly to your organization, contact us.