Vendors are key business partners. Maintaining good vendor relationships at all levels is essential to servicing your customers and controlling costs. One way to maintain good vendor relationships is to make your company easy to do business with. This should include providing the tools to vendors to manage their accounts and communicate with your AP team.
In the new normal vendors need the same flexibility and convenience as your company to work remotely and at hours that suit their needs. Extending office automation to your vendors can give them what they need and benefit your company by reducing costs and freeing up time for personnel to work on more important tasks.
Self-service portals for vendors are a logical extension of automating your office processes. Here are some of the activities your vendors can perform with self-service.
Onboarding
Successful onboarding is just as important for new vendors as new customers. Correct and complete master data for vendor profiles is essential to efficient operations, controlling costs and customer satisfaction.
A self-service portal for vendors makes it easy for them to provide the master data needed for their profile. The data is more likely to be correct and complete if they have a portal to work with. A self-serve portal also relieves your AP team of the time consuming follow up calls and emails that otherwise would be needed.
Profile Management
With a self-service portal, vendors can easily manage their profiles to keep them current. It’s more efficient for vendors and your AP team than calling or emailing your team with updates, which then have to be entered by your team. A self-service portal saves time and encourages vendors to keep their master data current.
Access Documents
A self-service portal can provide a convenient, time saving solution for vendors to access documents like W-9s. It’s faster and more efficient for everyone compared to requesting copies which your AP team has to then access and send to the vendors.
Send Messages
Messages can be left on a self-service portal eliminating the need to compose and send an email or call. Self-service portals save time and facilitate communication.
Self-service is a natural extension of office automation. It gives your vendors ownership in the business process, and saves time and reduces costs for you and your vendors. Automating office processes helps to increase profits, cash flow and shareholder value.
Lockstep Collect, a leader in cloud-based credit and collection platforms, can help you collect cash in 4 ways:
- Cloud-based solutions
- Automated customer communications
- Customer self-service
- Collections Activity Management
Lockstep Collect is an experienced software partner that can help you maximize your collections and cash flow in the new normal.
If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from automated credit and collection solutions, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.
