How can Volopay's vendor network unlock cost savings for business?

Businesses need to spend money in order to earn it. Although it sounds counterproductive, spending money on resources such as raw materials, labor costs, and indirect costs such as marketing can help your business gain customers and maintain a successful cash flow. But are all expenses ideal and justified? Sadly, they are not.

Whether by assessing your current vendor payouts and cutting back on costs, or looking at other vendor options and choosing those that best suit your needs, you can create an ideal vendor management system for your business.

Volopay helps you cut supply chain costs by fostering a healthy supplier network. Learn how you can reduce vendor costs and boost a formidable vendor-buyer relationship for your business with Volopay.

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Why having strong vendor network is important for your business?

No business in the history of the world has ever worked in isolation. You need to build a veritable network of vendors that works in tandem with your company and supply the necessary materials promptly. Why is this important? Here are a few reasons why having a dynamic vendor network can be extremely beneficial for your business

Reduce vendor costs

One of the most obvious benefits of having a good relationship with suppliers is the steep reduction in our vendor costs. Investing in healthy vendor relationship management can prove to be profitable for your enterprise. Apart from saving you a considerable amount of money in vendor payouts, it can also help you avoid additional costs such as researching new vendors, reducing quality issues, and consolidating your vendor network to only work with the very best of them.

Increase overall efficiency

A big reason for your business to be running like a well-oiled machine is the quality at which your vendor network is performing. A strong vendor network ensures inventory management runs like clockwork at your company. A seamless supply chain promotes sustainable scalability with lesser payment obstacles like late fees, slow processing, etc.

More satisfied and motivated team efforts

An efficient vendor network makes your employees feel delighted to work with them, and ultimately for you too. A strong vendor network results in lesser time doing mundane administrative and accounting tasks, faster procurement processes, streamlined inventory management, and superior customer service due to lower delivery delays and quality issues.

How to create deeper relationships with your suppliers to save cost and increase efficiency?

To forge deeper, long-lasting vendor relationships, it is important to ascertain which vendors are worth creating strong relationships with. Here’s how you can go on about optimizing your vendor management by stringent supplier evaluation

Identify areas of consolidation

The biggest area of unnecessary vendor costs is one where a multi-faceted vendor is only being used for a single raw material or service needed by your company. To avoid this, identify areas where two or more business requirements can be fulfilled by a single vendor. You can do this by creating a list of your current vendors and seeing which requirements can each of them deliver.

Consolidate categories that overlap to find areas of maximum utility. For example, can the office supplies provider also deliver printing services? Can a digital marketing agency also provide social media marketing services simultaneously?

Conduct thorough vendor evaluation

A key aspect of building an efficient cost-cutting supply chain management is assessing your current vendor roster on core qualities and capabilities you desire in a vendor going forward. While building on a preexisting relationship might save you the cost of finding a new vendor, however, it should not discourage you from evaluating your vendors fairly.

Some factors to keep in mind while evaluating your suppliers would be value and quality of services for costs incurred, clear communication, strong customer service, business longevity, and positive behavior towards partnership opportunities. Include your team in your decision-making process. Being the point of contact for your vendors, your employees might provide a far clearer picture of each vendor.

Pitch a proposal for a long-term synergy

Once you have decided upon your final vendor list after careful evaluation, pitch them a proposal for your previous plan of consolidating services. This will encourage your vendors to collaborate with you and increase their sales simultaneously. Carefully comb through your proposition to find additional areas of cutting vendor costs, such as shipping costs, early payment discounts, etc. Negotiate terms that favor your position in the deal. Once you have considered all the avenues related to a particular vendor deal, you can now make a decision knowing full well that you are building vendor relationships that are in it with you for the long haul.

A thorough vendor evaluation not only leads to cost-cutting supply chain management but also helps you find vendors who share a deep professional relationship with your business and are eager to partner up with you and therefore more likely to produce services customized to your needs with swift and prioritized delivery.

Streamline your vendor management process

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Does evaluating your vendors give you a cost-cutting advantage?

Cost-cutting is a planned approach to reducing business expenses. Thorough financial planning, cost-benefit analysis, and corrective actions can implement an effective cost-cutting supply chain management. One of these cost reduction techniques includes increasing the importance of vendor analysis to identify areas where cutting vendor costs benefits business operations.

While businesses worry that implementing cost-cutting strategies can negatively affect their preexisting vendor management practices. However, keeping yourself updated on the current marketplace standards vis-a-vis vendor pricing, terms and conditions, clauses, and contracts can you better manage vendor expectations. Here’s how you can cut supply chain costs whilst improving deliverable quality and strengthening your relationship with your most trustworthy vendors.

Prolonged contracts for bigger discounts

Once you have built a trustworthy vendor relationship, offer your vendors a longer contract in exchange for special discounts and additional benefits such as a 5-year contract as opposed to your usual 3-year contract. This leads to the creation of a strong vendor management system through trust, commitment, and a synergetic relationship with your vendor network.

Swap business credit card with corporate cards

Switching from your business credit cards to corporate credit cards can have a two-fold effect: first, it significantly reduces your vendor costs by removing the possibility of late fees, and secondly, it will benefit your vendors too since they will deal with a lower processing fee. Volopay corporate cards allow you to pay B2B vendors across countries while enjoying handsome cashback on FX transactions.

Establish a minimum purchase commitment

If your company maintains a consistent chain of supply-demand with your vendors, offer to set up a minimum purchase commitment with them in exchange for sizeable discounts on purchases made above the minimum value. This further reduces your vendor costs by getting great benefits and your vendor also enjoys a steady flow of revenue through your minimum purchase commitment and any gradual surplus that may follow.

How does Volopay’s vendor network reduce costs for businesses?

Volopay’s intrinsic feature of building a reliable and dedicated vendor network to perform an accurate cost-benefit analysis is the ideal way to create a cost-cutting supply chain management. Here’s how you can simplify and downsize your vendor payouts with Volopay

Real time visibility

Vendor management reaches a whole new level of transparency with real-time spend and vendor tracking system. With all your purchase orders and invoices in one easily accessible location, keep track of the where, when, why, and the value of all your vendor costs.

Volopay exposes invisible costs associated with each spend, giving you the liberty to choose the vendor that you wish to work with, not the other way around.

Increase administrative efficiencies

Empower your employees by limiting vendor management redundancies. Keep a track of all vendor data and safeguard it from getting lost or mixed up with a centralized vendor management system. Volopay acts as a central hub for your entire supplier database.

Access vendor history and automate payments thereby helping you increase administrative efficiency and saving additional labor costs.

Increase onboarding speed

Vendor onboarding can oftentimes end up becoming a tedious process, due to delays in collating necessary information regarding their payment processing, costing your company time and money. With Volopay, all payment information, from purchase orders to invoices and receipts can be linked to one vendor, making onboarding and vendor management a hassle-free process.

Strong and loyal relationships with your suppliers

Maintain healthy vendor relationships with vendor matching feature. Connect with ideal vendors, negotiate better rates on your purchase orders, with exclusive access to early payment discounts and incentives that can increase your profit margin.

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What added benefits does Volopay provide for vendor management?

Volopay also offers hosts of other advantages to streamline your vendor management system

Set multi-level approvals

Volopay’s customizable multi-level approval process makes vendor management a super simple and easy task. Volopay’s multi-level expense approval process comes with double-level security, verified by the creator of the expense and the checker. Your employees never have to worry about running around and getting vendor payouts approved by various departments. With Volopay, approvers assigned in workflows get real-time, instant push notifications to make sure that the vendor management process is right on track.

Accounting triggers for vendor payments

Volopay’s innovative Triggers feature eliminates the need for manual data entry of categories, tax codes, and more for recurring transactions. With Volopay, you can set certain triggers for particular transactions and it auto-fills all related future transactions instantaneously! You can choose any vendor, card, user, or department to set a trigger and that’s it - just set it and forget it!

Set and manage vendor payouts

Volopay provides a smooth interface for all vendor payouts through a standardized and streamlined process via a single entity, all the while lowering vendor costs. Set recurring payments for your recurring buyers and manage them with our centralized vendor management system that lets you track every transaction in real-time through our live dashboard.

Manage outstanding invoices

Volopay’s live dashboard lets you have a clear view of all your outstanding invoices to reduce the load on your employees. Volopay works as your perfect vendor management software, instantly syncing and updating all your paid invoices to the accounting system of your choice against the right vendors. For all your unpaid invoices, our platform can intuitively sort invoice information and schedule payments to vendors automatically.

Cross border B2B payments

Are you worried about the geographical restrictions of your current payment platform? Or are the sky-high FX charges stopping you from pursuing international vendors? With Volopay, you can pay your vendors across 130+ countries with swift & non-swift payment options at the lowest rates! Not only that, encourage healthy vendor management whilst earning cashback of up to 5% on every FX transaction using our unlimited virtual cards!

A strong vendor network is a gateway to establishing a cost-cutting supply chain management that favors buyers and suppliers alike. Volopay helps you streamline your expenses while enjoying the benefits of having a good relationship with suppliers.