Vendor Services

A furniture repair vendor is a company that has been set up as a payable supplier inside your organisation's own finance and procurement system, so that work can be ordered from it and paid for through the normal route. The phrase describes an administrative status rather than a trade qualification — the skill of the workshop has nothing to do with it. In practice the record consists of a W-9 and banking details held by accounts payable, a completed supplier form and portal registration held by procurement, and a certificate of insurance held by whoever controls the building. Until all three exist, a repair can be surveyed, quoted, approved and scheduled and still not begin, because there is no entity in the system for a purchase order to be raised against.

Send us whatever your system issues: the supplier or vendor form in its native format, a link and invitation to your procurement portal if you use one, your insurance requirement or rider, and the invoicing rules your accounts payable team works to — purchase-order references, entity name, remittance address. We complete and return them rather than sending you a generic pack to translate. If you do not know what your own requirement is, the insurance rider and the vendor form are the two documents worth finding first, because they are the two that most often turn out to contain a condition nobody expected.

Almost all of the elapsed time belongs to your side, not ours: forms are returned as they arrive, but approval routing, portal verification and finance sign-off run at whatever pace your organisation sets, and that varies enormously between a single restaurant and a managed portfolio with a procurement department. This is exactly why we ask for the paperwork at the survey rather than after a quote is accepted — run in parallel with pricing, onboarding usually costs no calendar time at all; run in sequence afterwards, it becomes the only thing anyone is waiting on. We do not quote a turnaround for it, because any figure would be a guess about your internal process.

Yes. Hosted procurement and supplier-management platforms, in-house portals built by a property group, and the simple email-and-PDF arrangement a smaller operator uses are all handled the same way — we register, complete the profile, keep the credentials, and maintain the record rather than re-registering at each job. Where a portal requires periodic re-verification or an annual document refresh, that renewal sits with us. The one thing worth flagging early is a portal that demands a document category we do not normally hold, since that is arranged rather than assumed.

Yes, and it is the case the vendor record is most worth building carefully. A group is onboarded once at the parent level and then draws on that single file for every property, so a new site is a work order rather than a fresh setup. Each building may still impose its own certificate holder and its own contractor rules — those are per-property and cannot be inherited — but the W-9, banking, supplier form and portal registration are not repeated. This is how the arrangement works for property management companies, hotel groups, corporate offices and multi-site restaurant operators, and it is the basis of a property and facility program.

No, and conflating them is the usual reason a start date slips. Insurance is about whether a building will admit a contractor to the floor; vendor status is about whether your finance system can buy from that contractor. They are checked by different people, held in different places, and either can be satisfied while the other is not — a fully insured contractor with no vendor record cannot be issued a purchase order, and an approved vendor without the right entities named on the certificate will not get past the lobby. The certificate side is covered in full on COI & insurance.