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Vendor information management specialists have heard it before. Strong passwords are vital to security. Their value cannot be overstated. Passwords are gatekeepers to our online identities, financial information, and processes, and they are the first defense against cyber threats. Understanding how to create a robust password is essential for anyone navigating the internet. Yet, cybersecurity…

Bank account verification is a crucial security measure for any organization engaging in business-to-business (B2B) commerce. By ensuring the legitimacy of bank account details before processing payments, companies can protect themselves against fraud, maintain regulatory compliance, and foster trusting relationships with other businesses. This article will outline the best practices for vendor bank account verification. Standardize…

Ensuring the security and accuracy of financial operations is paramount in business-to-business (B2B) commerce. One critical aspect of financial security is understanding and executing bank account ownership verification, which has garnered increasing attention in accounts payable departments across industries. This article aims to define bank account verification in a B2B context and explore why it…

There are nine essential steps involved in cleaning up a vendor master file. These steps include several actions that should occur at vendor onboarding but may not have happened when someone first added many vendors to the master file. Execution of each of these steps will deactivate old vendors and validate and verify current vendors,…

Criminals are compromising emails to steal money from businesses, governments and institutions. Any organization can be a target: businesses of any size, health care organizations, education, and local and state governments. Recent headline cases include Ubiquiti Networks, Toyota Boshoku Corporation, and Scoular Company. And the U.S. territory Puerto Rico offers a classic vendor email compromise…

Are You Prepared? Aggressive Cybercriminals Are Sophisticated; Security, IT and Finance Teams Must Be Too People receive more than 120 emails at work per day on average. That’s a lot of emails. So, we categorize and strategize our email activity. But when we see an email from the boss, we tend to open it. And…

U.S. organizations that issue payments of U.S. source income to U.S. or foreign payees are required to solicit and obtain valid certification of the payee’s TIN, name, residency and status, as per IRS regulations. According to Linda Foertschbeck, CEO of IRS Compliance and payment reporting expert, “Each payer is required by the IRS and many state tax…

Do not overlook the risks inherent in bringing in new vendors to your organization. The level of risk varies in degree according to types, amounts and consequence of products or services. But even office supply vendors should be validated, as victims of printer-toner scams can attest. Supply chain and corporate procurement researcher Jonathan Webb, in an…

Are you required to change your password every quarter? Do you have to include special characters in your passwords? It is annoying but also easy to update your password, right? Just add a “1” at the end of it. Then, next month or quarter, change the “1” to a “2,” and so on. Unfortunately, such cleverness…

If you are mystified by your company’s compliance responsibilities related to sanctions, there is help. In 2019 the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published new guidance on how to create a framework for an effective sanctions-compliance program. It can help you comply. And if you should inadvertently run afoul of the…

How do you collect your vendors’ W-9 information? What about bank information for ACH payments? Here is an instruction that one organization includes on its ACH Enrollment Form on which the vendor is asked for their bank account information. It’s common: “Please email the completed form along with a copy of a VOIDED CHECK to: … ”…

An Association of Financial Professionals (AFP) survey on payment fraud shows 80 percent of organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud in 2022. Payment fraud remains at that high level, having jumped up in 2015 to 73 percent of organizations and subsequently rising further.  What are the targets? Checks are targeted at 75 percent of…

Managing vendor relationships can be a challenge, especially as organizations make more and more demands on their vendors, such as improved pricing, terms and shipment quality. On the payables side, vendors are being asked to invoice using e-invoicing or EDI, to accept payment via ACH, EFT or credit card and to register and work with…

Procure-to-pay—also called purchase-to-pay or source-to-settle—refers to the entire process of procuring goods and services from start to finish. The process begins with identification of need and continues through final settlement. To maximize effectiveness and efficiency, organizations must take a holistic view of the entire process.  The end-to-end process cuts across organizations’ departmental structures. Traditionally the…

Are you a gambler? Do you look forward to a conference in Las Vegas so you can get in a little action? How about when it comes to compliance with IRS regulations? No doubt it would be a thrill not to hear from the IRS if you veer outside of the lanes of IRS compliance. But what…

Want to save time, work and potential penalties? First, get your vendors’ tax ID numbers (TINs) and tax classifications upfront. Then validate those TINs. Way back in 2003, the IRS introduced TIN matching. The IRS TIN Matching Program allows organizations to validate vendor TINs in advance of payment reporting. Any organization can register and use…

On November 25, 2019, Apple Inc. entered an agreement with the U.S. Department of Treasury to pay a civil penalty of $466,912. The fine is to settle the technology giant’s violations of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Sanctions resulting from its interactions with a Slovenian company SIS and its owner Savo Stjepanovic, both on the SDN list. How…

Threats to businesses abound, and given that accounts payable issues payments, it is a prime target for criminal perpetrators of all kinds. In addition to preventing myriad fraud schemes, AP must also ensure information protection and avoid unwitting payments to sanctioned entities. This, of course, involves compliance with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign…

Are you crafty? Handy? Do it yourself? Many of us like doing things by hand — some things, anyway. But let’s face it, there are other things we’d rather not have to do manually, especially some of the P2P processes. So how are organizations accomplishing vendor onboarding these days? Have companies automated, or is it still…

You interact with vendors every day. You do it in the context of specific, necessary functions like gathering requisite information, processing invoices, issuing payment, and answering inquiries. Your focus may be on just that. Getting those things done as well as your team and conditions allow. Any thought of the actual vendor is merely a second…

As she crossed the company parking lot early one morning, the director of shared services saw them. Men in black. Two of them. As she neared the building entrance, they approached and addressed her by name. She was afraid this day would come, and it finally had. They flashed their federal credentials, and she welcomed…

Teach your Internal Employees how to do business with the Vendor Team, including processes for adding or changing vendors as welll as about important internal controls, vendor team roles and more. Click here to view or download presentation slides. Vendor Welcome Letter template Vendor Policy template

Accurate Addresses, Duplicate Vendor Prevention Are your vendor addresses lacking standardization causing returned checks, vendor communication problems, and worse – duplicate vendors? Here is a way to check address status in bulk for US and Non-US vendor addresses.  Click here to view or download the presentation slides. Address Standardization Template

Most companies have vendors to whom a payment will be made only once. When these payments flow through the Accounting System or ERP, Accounts Payable must determine how to set up these vendors. Setting up a vendor in the vendor master file for a one-time payment could risk duplicate payments, fraud, or bad vendor record…

Learn best practices to obtain accurate or missing data from your vendors to prevent fraud, returned payments and duplicate vendors. How to follow-up with your vendors to find missing data or accurate data following the vendor master file clean-up. That is different from how to find your vendors missing data. Click here to view or…

You know W-8s expire, right? Here’s help tracking your foreign vendors’ W-8x forms’ expiration dates so you know when to collect updated forms and remain in compliance with IRS rules. Click here to view or download the presentation slides. Click here for the IRS W-8 Expiration Template.

The IRS allows a substitute W-9 form and you can make onboarding easier for a vendor by combining your vendor setup form and IRS Form W-9. In this presentation learn how to build a form that collects the data you need in order to add a new vendor or change an existing vendor. Click here…

The IRS also allows a substitute W-8BEN and W-8BEN-E form. You can make vendor onboarding easier for a foreign vendor (and ensure accurate completion of the W-8) by creating and integrating a substitute W-8BEN and W-8BEN-E with your vendor setup form. Learn to build a form that collects the data you need to add a…

If you run a business in the United States, you are familiar with the IRS Form W-9. Organizations use this form to collect a vendor’s Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) to ensure accurate reporting on information returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Collecting a W-9 from vendors is essential to vendor onboarding and information management….

Fraud Prevention You receive a request to change remittance information from the vendor. Is that really the vendor? Combat business email compromise, deepfakes, and other fraud tactics by creating a reference to authenticate incoming email and telephone requests – especially if you are still working remotely. Click here to view or download slides. Click below…

Beyond enabling transactions and meeting compliance requirements, vendor information plays another important role. Together with ERP transactional and p-card data, vendor information supports spend analysis.  What is spend analysis? It is a process that provides answers to these fundamental questions: The process involves gathering data on expenditures, cleansing and organizing it, then analyzing it to…

Criminals are using common technologies to commit fraud, employing social engineering to fool AP staff into paying them. Fraudsters employ phishing, vishing, smishing and more in business email compromise to gain access to organizations’ cash. Forewarned is forearmed. Learn how to combat cyber-fraudsters. Click here to view or download presentation slides.

If ever there was a time you want good relations with vendors, it’s when times are tough. For example, the impact of the pandemic on the economy challenged many businesses while offering opportunities to others. In early 2021, bankruptcy declarations ticked up. As your organization works to survive the storms of change it is critical…

Instructions Below is a sample IRS 972CG Penalty Notice Abatement Letter, in this case involving an acquisition of a non-compliant company. It is merely intended to provide an example. You must customize such a response letter according to the circumstances. The IRS Penalty Notice proposes civil penalties for information returns that are:– Filed late– Filed…

IRS LINK IRS Forms & Instructions https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw9.pdf Instructions for Form W-9 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf Form W-9 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw9sp.pdf Instructions for Form W-9 – SPANISH https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9sp.pdf Form W-9 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8.pdf Instructions for the Requester of Forms W–8BEN, W–8BEN–E, W–8ECI, W–8EXP, and W–8IMY https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8ben.pdf Instructions for Form W-8BEN (Beneficial Owner – Individual) https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf Form W-8BEN https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8bene.pdf Instructions for Form W-8BEN-E (Beneficial…

Have you ever received an invoice from a vendor you’ve never heard of?  Of course you have! You check the master file, but it’s not there. And it’s due in 30 days. Just kidding—it’s due by the end of the week. Last week. If you’re lucky, the buyer’s name is noted on the invoice. Or maybe…

Along with verifying that a vendor can provide the product or services needed at the appropriate specifications and requirement, an organization must also ensure that certain vendor information is correct. For example, the tax ID should be verified, as should bank information. But before that, an organization first must ensure that it may legally engage…