Procurement
Supplier registration survey
Ask for the vendor file once, in the order a supplier can answer it, and get it complete.
Why this survey gets sent
“Every new supplier costs me four emails before I have a file I can use. The registration certificate has expired, the bank letter is a screenshot of an app, and the person who sent both has left the company by the time we need to pay them.”
A registration survey is the same checklist, filled in by the supplier instead of chased by you. Required fields decide what “complete” means before anything is submitted, and each document arrives attached to the record that carries the name it belongs to.
What is in it
- Registered name, commercial registration number and address
- The person to deal with — name, email, direct number
- Categories supplied (multiple choice) and a line describing them
- Years trading and number of full-time employees
- Certifications currently held (multiple choice)
- Registration certificate and stamped bank letter (file uploads)
About 9 min to answer
Supplier registration survey
About 9 min
How to write this survey
Split it where the supplier's attention splits
A supplier knows their company details by heart and does not know what you want from them. Start with what needs no looking up — the registered name, the registration number, the address, the person to deal with — and leave anything that means opening a folder or asking a colleague to the second step. Somebody who starts answering finishes; somebody who hits a hard question on the first line closes the page.
Two steps beat one long page here, because registration is administrative work rather than an opinion. A title at the top of each step tells the supplier where they are and how much is left, and putting the uploads last means they never have to abandon the survey to hunt for a file before they have typed their own name.
Decide what “complete” means before you ask
A required field is not strictness; it is your definition of a finished file, written down once instead of rediscovered in every follow-up email. Make required only what you cannot create a supplier without: the registered name, the registration number, the address, the contact and their two numbers, the certificate and the bank letter.
Leave everything else optional, and mean it. Not every supplier has a website, the headcount may be different next month, and the trading name is often the registered one. Each extra required field buys you data you will not use and costs you the small supplier who would have saved you money.
Name the categories you buy, not the ones they sell
The riskiest question here is the category question, because its answers are what you will search a year from now. Write the categories in the words your purchasing team already uses — the words that appear on a purchase order — rather than the words a supplier uses to describe themselves. “Facilities maintenance” is something you search for; “integrated solutions” is not.
Make it a multiple choice rather than a single dropdown: most suppliers sell more than one thing, and anybody forced to pick one will pick the most valuable and hide the rest. Add a “something else” option, then follow it with one short open box where they describe what they supply in their own words — those two lines catch what your list did not predict.
Ask for each document by its exact name
Name the document and the state you need it in: “valid commercial registration certificate”, not “a copy of the CR”; “bank account letter, stamped by your bank”, not “bank details”. The difference between those two wordings is the difference between an attachment your finance team can accept and a screenshot of a banking app.
One upload field per document, never one field that swallows everything. When the letter lands in its own place and the certificate in its own, you can see what is missing without opening a single file, and you can chase the supplier with one specific sentence instead of a message asking for “the rest of the documents”.
A supplier file goes stale, and so does the person on it
Files go stale quietly: the certificate expires, the account number changes, and the contact leaves so nobody answers the shared inbox. Always ask for a named person with a direct number rather than a general company address — a general address means nobody in particular feels responsible for replying to you.
Then send the same link again once a year instead of building a new survey. The link does not change, the new answers arrive as a new dated record, and you end up with a history for each supplier rather than one copy you cannot date. Whoever does not answer within a fortnight is the first name to look at before the next award.