Vendor Management & Payment Automation
OVERVIEW
A multi-year strategic engagement focused on eliminating systemic inefficiency and establishing a reliable, secure vendor lifecycle management process.
THE CLIENT
A fiscal sponsor responsbile for managing payments across multiple organizations and vendors.
THE CHALLENGES
The initial system was characterized by high-friction processes that prevented scalable growth. Key challenges included:
ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN
Forms captured raw, unstructured invoice attachments inputs
DISCONNECTED DATA
Forms captured raw, unstructured invoice attachments inputs
ACCOUNTING DELAYS
Forms captured raw, unstructured invoice attachments inputs
ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN
Forms captured raw, unstructured invoice attachments inputs
Strategic Solutions & Intervention
"We want the team to be able to focus on client-facing work. "
NORTH STAR 001
There were a lot of moving parts to this, while the ultimate goal was to create a solution that automated vendor creation and bill creation, we understood a substantial amount of discovery would need to be conducted. We broke the project into three core phases.
Phase 1.1 Improving Data
During Phase I we focused on fixing small elements of the process that would bring about the most immediate impact. In order to do that we completed an end-to-end audit of their systems and processes.
NEW EXPENSE INPUT PROCESS
NEW VENDOR PROCESS
NEW BILL APPROVAL PROCESS
During this phase we focused on creating new processes using existing tools that would help improve the way in which data flowed to the system so that it was closer to the format that the accounting system required.
NEW VENDOR PROCESS
Previously email generic email links were being sent out to vendors to onboard into the system.
We created a new process that would require project managers to onboard vendors through the system so that we could:
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Log the date at which vendors were sent onboarding paperwork
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Log the date at which vendors completed paperwork
These two things were necessary for our future state to fully automate the process of getting them into the accounting system.
NEW EXPENSE INPUT PROCESS
Project managers are responsible for inputting vendor expenses into the system. They were previously combining all vendor expenses into a spreadsheet or they were sending raw invoice attachments. In both cases formats varied, causing our client to have to manually create the invoice number, tag all expense types, etc.
The new process would require that:
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Project managers input individual expenses for vendors
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Each expense tagged to the correct expense type upfront
The system would then handle taking those expense inputs and automatically creating bills in the correct format for Ramp's ingestion.
A Quick Note
We did explore leveraging Ramp's Bill Pay and having all project managers submit through that however - we needed fine-tuned rules for the accounting-coding and the native AI detection did not always recognize
CLIENT PORTAL
To support these new processes, we created a Client Portal using Airtable. With this portal project managers could:
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Easily add new vendors to start the onboarding process
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Create expenses for individual vendors and track processing status
Phase 1.2 Interface & User Experience Design
CLIENT PORTAL
PAYOUT INTERFACE
Phase III. Optimization & Integration
After improving our data quality and general structures, we could then proceed with creating integrations with the accounting systems. The key integrations:
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Creating vendor in Ramp after onboarding paperwork is submitted
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Creating a bill in Ramp after