How the Vendor Payment Process Works (and How to Improve It)

Hand holding USD next to hand holding a stablecoin representing how the vendor payment process works.

How to Improve Your Vendor Payment Process: A Guide for Finance Teams

Companies often depend on vendors to deliver their raw materials, software, professional services, maintenance, and more. While a small business may just partner with a few key suppliers, larger organizations tend to end up juggling dozens of vendors as they scale and enter new markets. Managing these partnerships can become a pain when suppliers rely on a variety of payment methods that run on different schedules and come with custom terms. This problem can often be solved with an overhaul of a company’s vendor payment process.

Businesses that haven’t optimized their vendor payment process can end up with missed due date penalties, duplicate disbursements, inaccurate financial records, and strained supplier relationships. If you don’t take care of your vendors, they might not take care of you.

This guide covers what a typical vendor payment process looks like, the common challenges that slow it down, and the best practices that help finance leaders improve it. We’ll also explore how the Slash business banking platform streamlines this process by automating payment execution, supporting diverse payment rails, simplifying vendor onboarding, and more.¹ With Slash, processing 500 vendor invoices a month can be just as simple as processing five.

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Key Takeaways

Two-way matching checks the invoice against the purchase order, while three-way matching adds confirmation that the goods or services actually arrived.
If your approval rules are already messy, automated routing isn’t going to help. That chain needs fixing before you add any volume.
Since an approver on vacation or an invoice routed to the wrong person can stall a payment for a week, you should have a backup route.
Early payment discounts such as 2/10 net 30 can offer 2% off for paying within 10 days of a 30-day term.
Stale banking information or missing tax documentation can completely stop a payment from executing. Using Slash’s vendor invite feature can help prevent incorrect information from being transcribed.

What Is the Vendor Payment Process?

The vendor payment process is the system a business uses to pay external suppliers and contractors for goods or services rendered. It spans from the moment a vendor submits an invoice to the point where that payment is recorded and reconciled in your accounting system.

This process is a key piece of the broader accounts payable (AP) workflow. While AP covers the full range of outgoing transactions, the vendor payment process specifically relates to validating, approving, and paying invoices from external parties. This might not be too hard for small businesses that deliver paper checks to a few local vendors, but larger companies can struggle with delays caused by multi-level approvals, missed emails, and transfer methods managed across multiple systems.

A smooth vendor payment process can:

Ensure suppliers are paid accurately and on time, preventing disputes, penalties, and supply disruptions
Improve vendor relationships, which may have an effect on future pricing and prioritization
Help prevent duplicate payments and fraud, which can frustrate providers and cost both parties money
Optimize financial reporting and cash flow visibility, unlocking an accurate, real-time view of outgoing transfers

How the Vendor Payment System Works

A vendor payment isn’t just a single step, even if you’ve mastered the art of accounts payable. Let’s look at a breakdown of how the vendor payment process typically moves from start to finish:

Vendor Onboarding and Payment Setup

Before any services are delivered or funds are sent, your supplier should be set up correctly in your system. Vendor onboarding often involves collecting banking information, verifying tax identification numbers, and running compliance and risk checks.

You also might use this time to negotiate contracts and agree upon payment terms. Between paper checks, virtual cards, ACH transfers, and more, suppliers may prefer to receive their funds through quite a few different avenues. Managing several payment methods across separate platforms can cause confusion and delays that bog down AP teams. Platforms like Slash, on the other hand, are built to support nearly any payment rail a vendor may request. Whether sending funds to providers via wire transfer, RTP/FedNow, or even cryptocurrency, Slash centralizes all outgoing payments on one real time dashboard.⁴

Invoice Receipt and Capture

Vendors may submit their invoices via email, upload them to a specialized portal, or send them through the postal service. Wherever they’re delivered, AP teams are in charge of ensuring that all data is extracted accurately and organized in an easily accessible fashion.

While some integrations exist that allow digital invoices to be captured automatically, physical invoices often end up being uploaded by hand to a company’s financial systems. Platforms like Slash often come with optical character recognition (OCR) technology that can convert both digital and physical invoices into machine-readable text. This allows specific fields like invoice number, vendor name and details, line items with amounts and descriptions, payment terms, and tax information to be identified and captured.

Invoice Verification and Matching

Before any payment is authorized, each invoice needs to be verified against what was actually ordered and received. Most finance teams accomplish this through two-way or three-way matching.

Two-way matching compares the invoice against the purchase order to confirm the quantities and prices align. Three-way matching reviews the goods or services that were actually delivered and compares them to the details found in both the invoice and the purchase order.

Approval Workflows

Once an invoice is verified, it moves into the approval workflow, where one or multiple approvers review it and sign off on the purchase. If you use Slash, you can program specific approval paths when the invoice is above a dollar threshold, related to a certain department, or from a particular vendor.

While well-planned approval workflows can help protect against fraud and keep everyone aligned, they may also lead to delays. If an approver is out on vacation or an invoice gets passed to the wrong person, the chain can break and the process can get backed up. It’s best to be prepared with a Plan B if an important approver is out of office.

Payment Scheduling and Execution

As you might imagine, paying your vendors is a pretty important step to the vendor payment process. It's also a step that can greatly benefit from automation.

Many modern accounts payable solutions can schedule payments based on invoice due dates or particular preferences configured by finance teams. Whether in the form of ACH transfer, international wire, or virtual card, payment methods are selected in advance for each supplier based on their preferences or your policies. With Slash, once a vendor's payment method is configured, every payment to that vendor executes correctly and on schedule without requiring setup or intervention for each transaction.

Payment Recording and Reconciliation

Finally, you should document all relevant details. Once a payment is executed, the transaction should be recorded in your financial system and the payment should be reconciled against your bank statements during month-end close. This not only enables more accurate reporting, but it can also lead to the discovery of duplicate payments, unauthorized charges, and other banking errors.

Automatic reconciliation can eliminate the manual work of matching bank statements to accounting records, confirming which invoices have been paid, and updating vendor balances. As your business scales and partners with new suppliers, you’ll probably find that automation can become a necessary investment.

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Slash goes above with better controls, better rewards, and better support for your business.

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Common Challenges in the Vendor Payment Process

Given all the moving parts that make up the vendor payment process, accounts payable teams that haven’t optimized their workflows often run into a number of obstacles. Some of these include:

Slow, manual invoice handling: Paper invoices, messy inboxes, and hand-typed data entries can weigh down processing times and lead to errors. A single typo in an account number or invoice amount can trigger a payment failure or dispute that takes days to resolve. Even when everything is executed correctly, manual processes add unnecessary time and effort that strains accounts payable teams.
Delayed approvals: Approval bottlenecks can end up causing late vendor payments, especially when invoices have to be routed by hand through needlessly complex chains. One missed email may lead to a week-long setback.
Limited visibility into payment status: Without a centralized system, it’s difficult for finance teams to figure out where a transaction currently stands along its journey. AP teams often lose track of payment statuses when each transfer is found on a different platform and completed at a different time.
Fragmented systems: Managing invoices, approvals, and transfers through three separate platforms can be a recipe for reconciliation disaster. Stitching the records from these tools together at month-end is a serious hurdle, especially when you’re entering it all manually.
Poor vendor data management: Inefficiencies and delays aside, vendor payments aren’t even possible in the first place if you have incorrect or incomplete vendor data. Staying up to date on supplier banking details and tax documentation is key to avoiding miscommunication and failed payments.

Improving Vendor Payment Workflows: What Finance Teams Should Focus On

Optimizing your vendor payment process comes down to two main themes: centralization and automation. Here’s how they can change the way you pay your suppliers:

Improve Invoice Intake

Working with a mix of physical and digital invoices tends to result in your data splitting up across disconnected software. Pairing Slash with an accounting solution like QuickBooks Online can optimize invoice receipt and keep your accounts payable processes running like clockwork.

If you primarily use QuickBooks for your invoicing, Slash can pull all outstanding invoices and arrange them on the same platform that streamlines their payment. When every invoice flows through the same channel and into the same queue, your team always knows what’s been received, what’s pending, and what’s overdue. It also creates a complete audit trail, which accounts payable departments will be thankful for come tax season.

Streamline Approval Workflows

Many accounts payable solutions allow users to automate invoice routing, which speeds up approval workflows and minimizes the potential for mistakes. These systems can allow customized approval paths based on vendor, department, or dollar amount. Approvers then receive notifications with invoice details, purchase order information, vendor history, and budget impact. From there, they can approve or reject directly within the system.

Automated routing can’t fix inherently broken approval hierarchies, however. It’s best to ensure your approval workflows are efficient before adding new tools and handling more invoices.

Automate Invoice Processing

After automating your approval process, why not automate everything else? Modern AP platforms can extract key data from invoices, match those invoices to purchase orders without manual comparison, flag discrepancies for human review, and execute the payment of approved invoices. These procedures are designed to require minimal human data entry and intervention, freeing up finance teams to focus on exception handling and vendor relationship management.

Automation can also help create a clearer and more consistent dataset, which makes it easier for accounts payable staff to track payment patterns and improve their cash flow forecasting.

Integrate Payment Systems with Accounting Software

If the platform you use to execute payments is separate from the one you use to record them, your AP staff often has to manually make the connection between those two places. Slash can build that bridge for you.

Along with QuickBooks Online, Slash integrates with NetSuite, Xero, and Sage Intacct, allowing organizations of all sizes to automate reconciliation and execute vendor payments in the same place they’re tracked and recorded. Our dashboard updates cash flow data and transfer statuses in real time, allowing finance staff to make decisions based on current numbers instead of last week’s reports.

Track Payment Cycles and Vendor Terms

Getting to know your supplier’s terms and preferences is key to forming good business relationships. When finance teams spend time battling approval delays and incomplete data, they may end up losing sight of previous agreements regarding payment cycles or preferences. With a messy accounts payable workflow, teams often tell themselves, “Just get it done,” instead of, “Get it done right.”

Some vendors will offer early payment discounts like a “2/10 net 30”, which gives companies a 2% discount if they pay within the first 10 days of a 30 day period. Consistently paying early enough to access these sorts of discounts can save companies valuable capital, especially when dealing with high-value invoices.

See How Slash Supports Structured Vendor Payment Workflows

A well-designed vendor payment process depends on three sequences: invoices moving through a structured review and approval workflow, payments executing reliably, and transactions appearing accurately in your financial records. Many accounts payable teams operate without systems that connect these steps cleanly, leading to obstacles when transferring data from point A to B to C. With Slash, the process can live at point A.

Slash is a business banking platform that provides the infrastructure accounts payable teams need to fully optimize their vendor payment processes. Rather than requiring finance professionals to navigate multiple pieces of software, manually input numbers, and trigger individual payments, Slash centralizes data collection and payment execution on an all-in-one dashboard.

We also allow you to request the details you need through Slash and let recipients submit their information securely in one place. With vendor information requests, you can invite a new recipient or request updated details from an existing one. In this invite, you may have them include payment details, an address, tax information, or any combination of the three. You can also add a personal note and preview the email and request page before sending. Your recipient then receives a secure link where they can sign in, provide the requested information, and submit it directly to your Slash account.

Slash also offers features such as:

The Slash Visa® Platinum Card: The Slash Card is a corporate charge card that allows you to set customizable spending controls and issue unlimited virtual cards for handling team expenses, vendor payments, subscriptions, and more. Users can also earn up to 2% cash back on eligible business purchases.
Working capital financing: Access short-term financing with flexible 30-, 60-, or 90-day repayment terms to help bridge cash flow gaps.⁵
High-yield treasury: Earn up to 4.02% annualized yield on idle funds with money market investments from BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, managed directly within your Slash account.⁶
Native cryptocurrency support: Send and receive USD-pegged stablecoins USDC and USDT across 15 supported blockchains for faster, lower-cost global payments.
Diverse payment rails: Slash supports a wide range of payment methods, including card spend, global ACH, international wire transfers to over 180 countries via SWIFT, and real-time domestic payments through RTP and FedNow.

If you’re looking to tighten up your vendor payment process, start with the business banking platform that centralizes and automates it for you.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What factors determine which AP software is best for a company?

The AP software you choose can depend largely on your company's volume of invoices and how often it pays vendors. Small businesses looking to automate specific payment processes may just want a cheap option, while corporations juggling constant transfers to different suppliers might choose the most robust piece of software on the market.

When do companies need global vendor payment capabilities?

Businesses shouldn't wait for their first overseas vendor to explore cross-border payments. Platforms like Slash can set companies up with international payment tools from day one, meaning they're free to partner with suppliers from other countries without having to reassess their vendor payment workflows.

What’s the difference between a vendor and a supplier?

The difference is mostly in what they supply rather than how you treat them. A supplier provides raw materials or components used to build a product, while a vendor sells finished goods or services ready for use or sale.