Choosing a supplier portal: a CFO's checklist

A supplier portal pays for itself only if suppliers stay in it and finance trusts what comes out of it. These are the questions we ask before recommending Velos, or any other portal.

• Does onboarding create the vendor in your ERP, or a second master that someone reconciles later?
• Can a supplier see the purchase order, acknowledge it and invoice against it without email?
• Is three-way match visible to the supplier and to accounts payable on the same record?
• Are GST, bank and MSME checks done before the vendor is allowed to transact?
• Can you reconcile vendor tax, not only store a PDF of the return?
• Do your SAP roles still apply, or does the portal invent a parallel security model?
• What happens to an invoice the match rejects — a queue with an owner, or a new mailbox?

If the honest answer to the first and the last is 'email', you do not have a portal yet. You have a website in front of the same process. Velos is built so the record finance posts is the record the supplier already saw.