Vendor onboarding template

This is the five-item test, and it exists because 'onboarding' is never anybody's next action while 'chase the certificate of insurance' is. Enter what you actually hold for one supplier, what you expect to pay them a year, and your payment terms. The sheet returns how many of the five items are complete, that as a percentage, the annual spend riding on the ones that are missing, the days left on the insurance certificate, and what a single payment at your terms would expose if the bank details have never been verified. On the worked example four items of five is 80%, $9,600 of the year's spend sits behind the missing one, and the unverified bank account puts $3,945 on one payment.

The five items, and why these five

A W-9 makes a 1099 possible at year end. A certificate of insurance matters only when something goes wrong, which is exactly when you cannot get one. A signed agreement decides what happens then. Verified bank details are the control against the most common fraud in small business payments. A named contact gives a problem somewhere to go. Nothing else on a typical onboarding checklist changes an outcome the way these five do.

The spend is what makes it urgent

Four of five sounds fine until the missing item is spread across the money. $48,000 a year over five items is $9,600 riding on each, and that is the number that gets a certificate chased. The sheet divides evenly on purpose: it is a prompt, not a risk model, and pretending to weight it would be false precision.

Bank details are a separate calculation, deliberately

The other four items are paperwork; this one is money leaving the building. At $48,000 a year on 30-day terms a single payment is around $3,945, and that is what an unverified account can cost in one go. Verified by callback means calling a number you already had, not the one in the email asking for the change.