Good vendor relationships are essential to servicing your customers and reducing costs. Make your company easy to do business with. Provide a self-service portal to vendors to maintain their accounts and communicate with your team.
Vendors need the same flexibility and convenience as your company to work remotely and whenever they want. Extending automation to your vendors can give them what they want, and help your company by reducing costs and saving time for your AP team to work on higher priority activities.
Self-service portals are a logical extension of office automation. Here are some of the ways your vendors can use self-service.
Vendor Onboarding
Onboarding is just as important for new vendors as new customers. Accurate and complete master data is essential to efficient operations and reducing costs.
Self-service for vendors makes it easy to provide the master data needed for their profile. The data is more likely to be accurate and complete if they have a portal to work with. A self-service portal also frees your AP team from the time consuming follow-up calls and emails that otherwise would be needed.
Vendor Profile Management
With a self-service portal, vendors can easily manage their profiles to keep them up to date. It’s less work for vendors and your AP team than calling or emailing with updates, which then have to be processed by your team. Self-service saves time and helps vendors keep their master data current.
Document Access
Self-service can be a convenient, time saving way for vendors to access documents like W-9s. It’s faster and more efficient compared to requesting copies from your AP team which has to then access and send them.
Messages
Messages can be entered on a self-service portal, avoiding the need to send an email or place a call. Self-service portals can save time and facilitate communications with your team.
Self-service is a logical extension of office automation. It gives your vendors a stake in the business process, and saves time and reduces costs for all concerned. Automated office processes increase profits and cash flow.
With a connected accounting solution for your AR and AP teams to coordinate work with customers and vendors, you can go digital and enjoy the benefits of office automation.
Lockstep, a leader in cloud-based connected accounting solutions, can help you boost productivity and optimize cash flow with:
- Digital Onboarding – Collect master data directly from your customers and vendors
- Accounting Inbox – Make it easy to divvy up work and track progress
- Smart Automation – Automate menial task with accounting integration
- Online Accounts – Give customers and vendors online access to their accounts
Lockstep is an experienced software partner that can help you increase efficiency and accelerate cash flow.
If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from connected accounting solutions, please contact Lockstep at www.lockstephq.com.
