Vendor Accountability

Using Zenput to manage your vendors credit requests

The question to ask yourself is are your vendors meeting their service standards? Are they delivering all the products they’re supposed to? Are your teams getting all the credit requests in? Are your vendors issuing all the requested credits? These are all questions you need to ask yourselves. If the answer is “I’m not sure,” then Zenput is just the tool to assist!

The place to start is ensuring that you have a strong system of accountability to manage and follow up on credit requests. You may be surprised at the amount of dollars that are slipping through your hands on this one.

We’ve built a form called “Vendor Credit Request Form.” It is simple to use and easy for the vendor to dissect. Any time you check in an order, and you determine that it is short, simply fill out a quick 14-question form. You will need the following information, which should be on the invoice:

• Vendor Name
• Account Number
• Invoice Number
• Invoice Date
• Product Code
• Reason for Credit Request
• Item Description
• Quantity
• Case or Each
• Unit Cost

Question #3 on the form is a multiple-choice question to select the correct vendor. It is currently set up for 3 vendors, but you can add as many as necessary. You will have to create a trigger for each vendor using the correct contact email for that vendor. You should also set up an alert for any internal contacts as well.

The recommendation is to run a report on this form every Monday and send the appropriate credit request information to each vendor. You now have a record of every credit request by the vendor in one place, which is easily trackable. I would ensure that someone follows up on all the requests that remain open before the close date of any month or period, so your P&L is accurate. Once the form is set up, running the report and distributing it out to the appropriate vendors is only a 10-minute exercise. We have several customers doing this, and depending on the size of their entities, they are recouping anywhere from several thousand dollars up to as much as 2 million for a bigger entity.

If you would like to have this form template added to your Zenput account, please copy and paste the message below into the Chat function in Zenput and our Support team will add it for you: 

“Hi Support, can you please add the form below to our account? Vendor Credit Request Form: Loss Prevention Pillar - 452810”