The accounts payable process involves more than catching up on outstanding bills—the workflow can make or break your supplier relationships, especially when you’re dealing with suppliers or vendors located overseas. Think about it: when it comes to paying foreign suppliers, you’re not only handling invoices but also dealing with tax compliance
fraud monitoring, currency exchange rates, banking requirements, and more. If your supplier payment process can’t nimbly respond to these factors, you’ll have to manually adjust your supplier payment process to each vendor’s situation. Simply put, your accounts payable workflow won’t thrive on a global scale.
What is supplier payment?
A vendor payment–or supplier payment–is the last step in the purchase to pay cycle, when a company pays an outside vendor for purchased goods or services. Supplier payments can be done automatically through a variety of online platforms that help streamline and secure the process of making a supplier payment.
When the company initially orders goods or services from this external provider, a purchase order is created. Once the goods or services have been delivered, the company will receive an invoice form the external provider and will then pay this invoice in the form of a supplier payment.
When you view the supplier payment process essential to fostering strategic partnerships, you’ll create an accounts payable process that scales with global growth. You can ensure your AP workflow grows alongside your expanding business operations when your supplier payments process has these three aspects:
