How to optimize NetSuite vendor management with AP automation
Good supplier relationships are critical to any company’s success.
The benefits of healthy supplier relationships go beyond vendors providing the right goods and services at the right time and price. Investing in strengthening the relationships in your supply chain can transform suppliers into valuable partners who work towards your mutual success.
The built-in NetSuite Vendor Management system is an adequate solution for Oracle NetSuite customers looking to automate basic vendor management processes. However, businesses needing greater functionality and efficiency should consider integrating NetSuite with an AP-specific financial automation solution that offers advanced vendor management features. Taking an integrated approach to vendor management automation enhances visibility and control over vendor relationships.
Automated vendor management is a core component of procure-to-pay (P2P) optimization and supply chain management. Leading financial automation platforms like Stampli significantly improve supplier relationship management from onboarding to communications to payments.
In this article, we’ll show you how integrating advanced vendor management with Oracle NetSuite can optimize vendor relationships. We’ll look at NetSuite’s vendor management capabilities, talk about the benefits of using an integrated vendor management solution, and briefly examine how you can use automation to improve vendor management workflows.
Let’s jump in.
What is NetSuite Vendor Management?
Vendor management software streamlines and optimizes the various processes associated with supplier relationships. The automation solution can be standalone or, more usually, included as an ERP module or a procurement or financial automation software feature.
NetSuite Vendor Management is a set of features available within the optional NetSuite Procurement module. It helps NetSuite users manage vendor records and track vendor performance. It also provides an online portal to facilitate vendor communications and enables customers to assign multiple subsidiaries to a vendor record.
The solution consists of 4 features:
Vendor records
Vendor records centralize supplier data like contact information, pricing, contracts, financials and purchasing transactions, outstanding bills, payments, credits, documents, and files.
Vendor portal
NetSuite’s vendor portal provides a communications hub for users and vendors to communicate and share documents and information.
Vendor scorecard
The vendor scorecard tracks supplier performance metrics like pricing, lead times, on-time deliveries, defects, and shortages.
Multi-subsidiary vendor
The multi-subsidiary vendor feature lets users assign multiple subsidiaries to a shared vendor record. It also shows the vendor’s total outstanding balance across all subsidiaries.
Customers primarily use NetSuite Vendor Management for sourcing management, vendor performance, and contract management. Although it’s a powerful vendor management tool, it has limited accounts payable functionality. Let’s look why you may want to consider an integrated solution as an alternative for vendor management in NetSuite.
Advantages of integrating vendor management in NetSuite
Integrating a vendor management solution with NetSuite provides greater visibility and control over supplier relationships. Here are 5 reasons why:
1. Decreased cost of goods sold
Supplier costs can make up a significant percentage of your cost of goods sold (COGS). Vendor management automation can reduce COGS by ensuring procurement teams have up-to-date vendor information to easily compare pricing, business terms, and vendor performance to find the best vendor. It also makes it easier for AP teams to resolve vendor disputes and process invoices efficiently, helping to avoid late payment fees and take advantage of early payment discounts.
Stampli centralizes communications on the invoice to facilitate collaboration between AP teams and vendors and make invoice processing faster and more accurate. Each stakeholder, including vendors, only see the information relevant to them, and nothing else.
“Stampli is the billing processing platform you always hoped for.” says one customer. “I use it everyday. Billy is brilliant and continues to learn as we learn. We have gotten bills processed more efficiently, faster and have gotten back time…It has also helped get the approvals to the right department. With the right eyes on the right bill, questions have been asked and errors have been caught. We have saved more money than ever. Double payments have also gone down.”
2. Centralized vendor document management
Vendor management involves lots of paperwork. During the onboarding process, vendors are often required to provide several documents to comply with regulations and establish a business relationship. These include tax forms, contracts and legal documents, insurance certificates, permits, certifications, and licenses. The documentation requirements can be even more stringent for certain industries such as construction, non-profits, health care, and government entities. Required documentation can include:
Tax documents
The IRS requires all businesses to issue 1099 forms when they pay certain vendors. Other vendors may need to complete W-8, W-9, or other federal, state, and local forms.
Insurance certificates
Businesses may require vendors to carry a certificate of general liability or other insurance before providing goods or services.
Licenses and certifications
Certain professions and industries may require vendors to hold licenses or certifications and make them ready for inspection as needed. Many businesses also require suppliers to prove compliance with environmental or diversity and inclusion standards as a condition of doing business.
Manually communicating with vendors and gathering documents takes time and effort and is prone to errors. Vendors may need to submit documents via email, mail, or in person, and AP teams must review and enter each document. Critical documents can easily get lost or misdirected, creating a significant liability risk if a vendor is non-compliant.
Stampli Advanced Vendor Management simplifies vendor onboarding, document management, and compliance. Its vendor portal provides a hub where vendors can communicate with AP teams and upload documents. Advanced Vendor Management facilitates self-serve vendor onboarding with customizable templates that ensure vendors provide the required information and documents. By automatically keeping vendor information and documents up to date, Stampli enables organizations to strengthen financial controls and maintain a complete and accurate vendor master file in NetSuite.
“Stampli is a top-tier A/P automation platform,” says one Stampli customer in construction. ”It contains a plethora of technology-packed features to help cut back low-value tasks like data entry and invoice approval routing.
In addition, it features a great vendor management system for subcontractor documents that makes vendor management for construction companies a breeze. It is intuitive and easy to implement and use by a wide variety of technology proficiency levels.”
3. Centralized and efficient communications
Many organizations rely on email, phone, and even paper-based communications with vendors. These manual processes are slow and inefficient, and important communications often get lost. For example, a procurement manager may negotiate a discount with a vendor but neglect to advise other stakeholders that the discount exists, resulting in the business paying a higher price.
Some financial automation systems consolidate stakeholder and vendor communications within a single hub, eliminating the need for multiple channels and reducing the risk of miscommunication. They record all messages and documents, letting users easily track conversation histories or access old messages and maintaining a complete audit trail. They also provide vendors with a portal where they can upload invoices and documents, ask and answer questions, and check payment status.
Communications hubs improve vendor communications by bringing everything into one place, but it can be difficult for users to focus on conversations about individual invoices. Stampli facilitates effective collaboration by centralizing all communications and documentation on the invoice itself. Users can get the invoice information they need at a glance, and vendors can ask questions via an online portal.
One G2 reviewer shares how centralizing communications with Stampli has made their AP processes more efficient: “We were having a big issue with invoices going missing. We would scan invoices into batches and then email the batches to people to code in Adobe via digital signature. You’d be surprised at the amount of invoices that went missing in that process. Stampli has also streamlined our communications around invoices.
We used to have multiple email chains, notes hand written on the invoices, etc, and now all communications are centralized. It’s cut down on the blame game, like ’so and so said this about the invoice but the AP clerk didn’t record it and now the info is lost.’”
4. Improved AP process efficiency
In NetSuite, traditional AP processes like data entry, coding, and invoice matching are slow and inefficient. This often results in delayed payments and is susceptible to errors. As a result, AP teams and vendors spend excessive time correcting mistakes, leading to tied-up resources and frustration.
Financial process automation platforms streamline and optimize invoice and payment processing to improve AP process efficiency and strengthen vendor relationships. They speed up the invoice processing lifecycle and help organizations pay vendors faster. They also provide increased accuracy and transparency, reducing the time AP teams and vendors spend resolving disputes.
Although many financial automation platforms offer AP automation, Stampli is the only solution specifically designed to meet the unique needs of AP departments. It streamlines invoice management, eliminating the need for external communication, ad-hoc workarounds, and manual AP tasks. Stampli provides complete visibility into every transaction, making audits and month-end close easy and informing strategic business decisions, and is flexible to adapt to AP teams’ evolving needs.
“Stampli’s invoice approval process has made our AP team’s lives a million times easier!” says one Stampli customer. “We used to spend so much time tracking down invoices, naming and coding them, manually emailing each one out for approval, tracking the invoices until we get an approval back, then manually saving and merging each approval to its matching invoice, before we were ever even able to begin keying the invoices into our system.
Stampli has reformed this process completely! We now just forward our invoices to Stampli, then our AP team goes in, codes each invoice (which Stampli does half of this for us), selects the approvers it needs to go to, then sends. Once the invoice has been approved by all approvers, it shows up in our Approved Invoices tab, where we can easily authorize it for payment and then export it out to our financial system…We love that we are able to see all communications between everyone who has touched the invoice, all in one central location with Stampli’s Communications Hub. This makes it much easier to know where an invoice is at in the process, without having a million separate emails going around.”
5. Integrate NetSuite with vendor management software
Many Financial automation platforms integrate with NetSuite to share data and augment NetSuite vendor management and AP processes. This integration lets customers enjoy NetSuite’s power and flexibility while taking advantage of advanced services to maximize process efficiency.
Built for NetSuite certified, Stampli’s pre-built NetSuite integration supports NetSuite’s full native functionality without any change to your existing processes. Stampli provides real-time data syncing for NetSuite that keeps lists in sync without loading delays and ensures data integrity. NetSuite customers can map any custom field to Stampli without rework, and Stampli supports mapping saved searches to custom fields.
Stampli also provides OneWorld support that lets you manage multiple subsidiaries in one Stampli account, enhancing NetSuite’s multi-subsidiary vendor management capabilities. It’s a “[m]ust have for any CFO managing multiple entities!” according to one Stampli customer, who continued: “This was the only product that could support multiple entities, banks, approvers and QB files with a single account/login. The ability to customize the ’canned’ product to our needs for records retention, segregation of duties, etc is impressive. AND, the product connects seamlessly with a remote desktop that hosts our QB software. Amazing, really.
…If you are a CFO that manages multiple companies, has a remote team of reviewers and approvers, and needs records held electronically, you should definitely give Stampli a try….. I have one login for all the entities I manage. Myself and the team have everything in one centralized place that we can access from anywhere. Stampli is a huge time saver, and most definitely a strategic investment in operational cost savings.”
How to optimize NetSuite vendor management software
Integrating financial automation software with NetSuite optimizes vendor workflows like onboarding, procure-to-pay, and performance management. Let’s walk through each of these:
Vendor onboarding
Onboarding a new vendor can be complicated, especially when done manually. Collecting vendor information such as names, contact information, bank account information, contracts, SOWs, and other documents is time-consuming and prone to errors. Team members can misfile documents, and information can fall out of date, creating headaches and delays for procurement teams and vendors alike.
Stampli Advanced Vendor Management lets businesses easily onboard new vendors. You can use custom forms and documents to ensure that vendors provide correct and complete onboarding information. The platform synchronizes with NetSuite so stakeholders can access up-to-date vendor information and documents.
Some platforms allow you to set document expiration dates to keep documents current. The system notifies procurement teams when a critical document, such as a contract, needs to be reviewed and renewed.
Supplier management
Supplier management is at the heart of the NetSuite P2P process. Managing a purchase by email and paper documents can quickly become disorganized, especially if the transaction is complex and involves multiple purchase orders, vendor bills, and delivery dates. Extracting information from emails, tracking and verifying requisitions, POs, receipts, and invoices, and paying vendors can cause delays and increase the chance of errors.
Automation makes the P2P process simpler and more efficient. For example, vendors can submit transaction documents like receipts and invoices to a central email address or through a vendor portal. The system captures these documents, automatically enters them, and performs 3-way matching to confirm that the invoice is correct. The AP platform also automatically syncs the transaction data and documents with NetSuite in real time, ensuring that all the stakeholders in the P2P chain have access to timely and accurate information.
Vendor performance management
Manually managing vendor performance can be challenging. Tracking vendor delivery times, payment history, and communications involves searching for emails and paper documents and then assembling everything into a report. The process is slow, and staff may miss important information.
Vendor management solutions can assist in vendor performance management by keeping all vendor information in one location. Teams can easily access payment history, search through communications, and confirm the number of errors or late deliveries, making it much simpler to track vendor performance in real time.
Automation platforms automatically update invoice and bill information with the relevant NetSuite procurement modules so all stakeholders can access supplier KPIs and metrics anytime.
Empower NetSuite with Stampli Advanced Vendor Management
Vendor management automation improves your vendors’ experience. Stampli goes beyond the vendor portal with Advanced Vendor Management, a simple and powerful way to streamline vendor processes, improve communications, and keep vendors happy.
Advanced Vendor Management builds on Stampli’s industry-leading AP automation solution to manage vendor onboarding, streamline the P2P process, and share vendor information and KPIs across the organization. You can process invoices faster, pay vendors on time, and seamlessly integrate accounts payable and vendor management with your NetSuite ERP.
“Stampli AP Automation is worth every penny!” says a TrustRadius reviewer. “We use Stampli as a means to augment our AP data entry as we went from 1.5 employees down to .5 employees dedicated to AP. We have a high volume of invoices for the staff time allocated to AP, and Stampli has made it very manageable. We use Stampli to have a more robust and meaningful invoice approval process than we had prior.
We have a unique issue of paying over $600 to individuals as a reward for referring customers to us, so we need to collect W9s before we can issue payment. This program has ballooned from several dozen to several hundred payments, and W9 compliance has been difficult to manage. Our Stampli rep worked with us to come up with a solution using the Stampli vendor portal after our referral software vendor basically shrugged their shoulders (even though they acknowledged that several of their customers were having similar W9 issues).”
Advanced Vendor Management features
Here are the key features of the cloud-based Advanced Vendor Management solution:
Streamlined communications
Reduce inefficiencies by streamlining communications with everyone in the P2P chain. Stakeholders can easily:
- Ask and answer questions from other team members and vendors
- Access data and documents in a single location
- Notify stakeholders when action is required
- Request updates to any invoice field
- Instantly see the status of an invoice
Data and documents in one place
Create a single source of truth for vendor information. Improve your ability to onboard and manage vendors by centralizing all vendor documents and data and syncing them with NetSuite.
Onboard vendors with ease
Reduce the time and effort spent onboarding vendors and ensure you have complete and current vendor information like licenses, certifications, and insurance policies.
Customize your vendor portal with your brand
Customize your portal with your logo and company colors to create a seamless brand experience and reinforce your brand identity with your vendors.
Happy vendors, happy life
Build stronger, more successful vendor relationships. Contact Stampli today to set up a free demo of Advanced Vendor Management.
