Mastering Your Vendor Master

It’s a common complaint from new PaymentWorks customers: “Our vendor database is a mess. It’s full of errors and duplicates, and we’re not even sure the vendor data is accurate.”

This is typical and compelling condition that drives PaymentWorks adoption: after all, having suppliers actively manage their own profile data is the cleanest and most efficient way to ensure you have the right data - and ultimately ensuring you’re paying the right supplier.

But you don’t want to add high-quality supplier data from PaymentWorks on top of chaos. And while PaymentWorks can dramatically improve the quality of your existing vendor data, it is still essential to identify duplicates and records with incomplete data - especially suppliers with missing Tax ID Numbers (TINs).

Uploading your Vendor Master Data to PaymentWorks

A key aspect of the onboarding process lies in having a read-only copy of your supplier records uploaded to PaymentWorks. This allows the platform to check incoming registrations against existing records to flag duplicates or alternate addresses.

When adopting PaymentWorks, having clean and reliable supplier data becomes critical from the start, when that data is uploaded as a reference table. Ideally therefore, your vendor master cleanup should happen before you go live with PaymentWorks.

Note: the cleanup can happen in parallel with the initial implementation.

Key Vendor Record Attributes

This section addresses the data elements that are most important to get right prior to uploading your supplier records to PaymentWorks.

1. TINs

Payers typically upload their entire supplier table to their PaymentWorks account, as a read-only reference that is used for validating incoming registrations. Specifically, PaymentWorks checks the TIN on each registration against all known TINs in the ERP, as represented in the uploaded supplier list.

Therefore... One of the most important fields you want to provide PaymentWorks is the TIN field. If you have supplier records that are missing a value for the TIN, you can still upload the vendor record - PaymentWorks does not require uploaded supplier records to include a value in the TIN field. However, these records really aren’t helpful because without TINs, PaymentWorks does not check for incoming registration duplicates.

Bottom line: part of the vendor master cleanup involves purging or completing vendor records that are missing TINs.

2. Vendor Numbers and Site Codes

PaymentWorks enables (but does not require) parent-child relationships in vendor records, where the “parent” data is comprised of legal and tax information that is generally associated with a single TIN.

Within that parent or “top-level” vendor record, there may be “child” data that represents the actual person or entity that is getting paid. Multiple child records usually represent different locations, subsidiaries, DBAs or alternate payees operating under the same TIN. This subordinate data generally consists of a corresponding address and contact information.

In this PaymentWorks model, the parent level is represented by the “Vendor Number” and the subsidiary data is represented by the “Site Code”. So a key step in preparing your data for incorporation into PaymentWorks is understanding how your ERP’s data model maps to the PaymentWorks Vendor Number and Site Code structure.

Note: If your ERP or internal practices do not support multiple locations or DBAs with the same TIN operating under a single Vendor Number - this is common with SAP, for example - then you may not need or want to use the Site Code field, which in that case can be left blank.

3. Address Types

By default, PaymentWorks implementations support these types of addresses:

• The Corporate Address is associated with the top-level (parent) vendor record. PaymentWorks also associates other business/legal attributes at the parent level, including Legal Name, Tax ID Number and classification.

• The Remittance Address provided in a supplier registration is site-specific and therefore subordinate (child) to the top-level vendor number. Although a registration allows submission of only one remittance address initially, suppliers can add and manage other sites (remittance addresses) in their profile.

• A Bank Address is always included when a supplier provides their bank account. If the supplier specifies payment through ACH, the registration will include bank account information including the bank address.

• Optional: an Order Address is a fourth address type that is also supported by PaymentWorks and can be added either during the initial implementation or sometime later.

Note: a separate article will address the configuration and usage considerations when adding Order Addresses.

Corporate and Bank addresses are not used when uploading supplier files to PaymentWorks. For most customers, only Remittance Addresses are provided because these where the payer-payee connections are established (see this article for more).

For customers that have opted to collect Order Address fields from the suppliers registering through PaymentWorks, these address types are also included in the uploaded supplier data. In this case, the data must make use of the upload field called “AddressType”. This field differentiates between Remittance Addresses (entered as REMIT) and Order Addresses (entered as ORDER).

Note that Customers who have not enabled the Order Address functionality generally exclude the AddressType field or leave it blank, since all provided addresses are assumed to be Remittance Addresses.

From a data perspective, the vendor master cleanup process does not need to take a long time. The challenge is often in determining how to handle old, outdated supplier records, managing parent-child relationships across records, and looking for duplicates when TINs are missing from the data.

Next Steps

At NVR Partners, we have done dozens of cleanup projects prior to, or alongside, PaymentWorks implementations. To learn more about the approach or to discuss your specific area of interest or concern, please reach out to set up a complimentary consultation. We’d be happy to connect!

You can fill out this form including an overview of your interest, or simply email us directly at bestpractices@nvrpartners.com.