Payable Strategies for the Long Tail Suppliers — Stage 1: Assessing Your Current Situation

In this five-part Spend Matters PRO series, we will help companies address how to approach paying suppliers early given your current baseline and legacy situation. If you’ve been tasked with a mandate from your CFO to find a way to offer early pay finance to all (or a vast majority) of suppliers and create a “win/win” with your supply base, we’ve designed this series for you.

We also hope this will help with tech selection. It should allow companies in the market for solutions to coordinate internal departments like procurement, AP, shared service centers and treasury to plan for and assess different technology choices and ultimately determine the best option for the company and its supply base.

For this series, here are the five stages for tackling your payables strategy:

• Stage 1 — Assessing Your Current Situation
• Stage 2 — Understanding Addressable Spend & Early Pay Options
• Stage 3 — Addressing Operational Challenges Early
• Stage 4 — Selection Process and Key Issues to Address
• Stage 5 — Getting to a Decision

Today, we’ll give a 2021 overview of early pay finance. And before we talk about where and how to begin, we’ll discuss the complexity around the company’s current baseline of technology, spend categories and legacy procurement contracts.