Vendor management: keeping track of who you depend on

Vendor management is the practice of knowing, for every supplier you depend on, who they are, what you agreed, what you pay, when it renews and what you would do without them. It sounds like an enterprise concern and it is not: a company of fifteen people typically depends on forty suppliers, of which perhaps five are genuinely hard to replace — and almost nobody can name those five without looking.

The failure is rarely dramatic. It is a contract that auto-renewed for another year at a higher price, a critical tool whose only administrator left, a supplier whose insurance lapsed, or a subscription paid for eighteen months after the project ended.

What to record for each vendor

• Legal name, trading name, registration number and address — the details you need for a contract or a dispute, not just the ones on their website.
• What they provide, in your words, and which part of your operation stops without it.
• Your contacts there: account manager, support route, escalation, and a second name so the relationship does not rest on one person.
• The agreement: start date, term, notice period, renewal date, and where the signed document lives.
• Commercials: price, payment terms, what triggers an increase, and what you actually spent last year.
• Criticality: could you switch in a week, a month, or not at all. This one field changes how you treat everything else.
• Compliance items where they apply — insurance, certifications, data processing terms — with expiry dates.
• Your internal owner: who is accountable for this relationship working.

The renewal date and notice period together are the most valuable fields in the whole record, and the ones most often missing. An agreement with ninety days' notice that renews automatically must be diarised at least a hundred days out, or the decision to renew is made for you. Every unhappy vendor conversation starts with somebody discovering this two weeks too late.

Running it without creating a department

1. List every recurring payment from last year's bank and card statements. That list is more accurate than anyone's memory and always contains surprises.
2. Mark each one critical, replaceable or trivial. Then spend your attention almost entirely on the critical ones.
3. For the critical few, write down what you would do if they stopped tomorrow — an alternative, an export of your data, a manual fallback. This is the whole point of the exercise.
4. Diarise every renewal at notice period plus a fortnight, with the internal owner named.
5. Confirm you can get your data out of anything that holds it, and test the export rather than trusting the feature list.
6. Review pricing annually on the top few by spend. Suppliers rarely reduce prices unprompted, and renewal is the only moment you have leverage.
7. Reassess the list once a year: which vendors were added without anyone deciding, which are still being paid for nothing.

Concentration is the risk worth naming

Two questions expose most vendor risk in a small company. Which single supplier, if they failed tomorrow, would stop you trading — and do you have your data out of them in a usable form? Everything else is optimisation. Cloud services fail rarely but comprehensively; a sole supplier of a physical input fails more often and more slowly. In both cases the mitigation is decided in advance or not at all, because the middle of an outage is not when you research alternatives.

In Ettex, the supplier list itself fits Ettex Contacts: contacts and companies as separate but linked records, custom fields for account numbers and criticality, tags and smart lists to separate critical vendors from trivial ones without duplicating anything, import and CSV export so building the list from a statement export is a paste rather than a project, and an activity feed so the last conversation with an account manager is visible. Where the register needs more structure — renewal dates, notice periods, insurance expiry, spend per year as fields you filter and sort — Ettex Records gives you typed tables with relations, saved views and revision history. Contracts live in Ettex Docs and are signed through Ettex Signature; renewal dates go in Ettex Calendar, because a date in a table that nobody looks at is not a reminder.

The boundary: Ettex has no vendor-management module. There is no automatic renewal alerting, no supplier portal, no risk scoring or questionnaire workflow, no spend analytics, and no monitoring of a supplier's financial health or certifications. You get an address book, structured tables, documents and a calendar — enough for a company tracking dozens of suppliers, and not what you want when tracking hundreds under a formal risk regime.

How vendor management fails

• No list at all, so the answer to "who do we depend on" is assembled from bank statements during a crisis.
• Renewal dates untracked, which hands the pricing decision to the supplier.
• One person holding the relationship, the login and the context, who then leaves.
• Critical and trivial suppliers treated the same, so the attention is spread evenly and thinly.
• Data-export capability assumed rather than tested, discovered to be limited at the worst moment.
• Contracts stored in personal mailboxes, which means the notice period is unknown when it matters.
• New vendors added by whoever needed them, with no moment at which anyone decided.

Vendor management is one list, honestly maintained. Record the term and the notice period, mark what is genuinely critical, name an owner, and test the exit before you need it.