Procurement check: onboarding a new supplier
A practical checklist to run before you sign with a supplier you have never worked with, covering registration, references, terms, certification and the first performance review.
- 1
Confirm the company actually exists and is trading
Look the supplier up in the national trade register. In the Netherlands that is the KVK Handelsregister; most countries have an equivalent public register. Check that the entity is active, that the legal name on the quote matches the registered name, and that no insolvency or dissolution has been recorded. This takes about five minutes and rules out the single worst outcome: signing with a company that cannot be held to anything.
- 2
Check who is allowed to sign
The person negotiating with you is not automatically the person who can bind their company. A trade register extract lists the directors and proxy holders, along with any limits on their authority. If your contact is neither, ask for a power of attorney before signing. See authorised signatory for what to verify and why an unauthorised signature can leave you without enforceable rights.
- 3
Ask for two references, then actually call them
Request two current customers of a comparable size or sector, and phone them. Ask about three things specifically: whether deliveries arrive when promised, how quickly the supplier responds when something goes wrong, and whether invoices match what was agreed. Generic praise tells you nothing. A supplier who cannot produce a single reachable reference has told you something useful.
- 4
Benchmark the quote against at least one competitor
Request a quote for the same scope from one other supplier. Without a comparison you have no way of knowing whether the price, the lead time or the terms are reasonable. Bain & Company found that external purchasing accounts for 43 percent of total business costs on average, so even a small pricing error repeats itself across your largest cost category. Above your procurement threshold, competing quotes should be mandatory rather than optional.
- 5
Read the payment terms, notice period and renewal clause
Three clauses decide how much this contract will actually cost you. Payment terms, where 30 days is the usual starting point and a shorter term is negotiable. The notice period, which tells you how long you stay locked in once you want to leave. And the automatic renewal clause, which is how most SMEs end up in a second term they never chose. CIPS reports that up to 80 percent of invoices deviate from the original contract, so what you sign here is what you will spend the next year arguing about.
- 6
Verify certifications, insurance and data processing
Ask for evidence rather than claims. Depending on the sector this means ISO certification, food safety or site safety accreditation, or sector-specific quality marks. Request proof of liability insurance and check the cover amount against the value of the work. If the supplier will handle personal data on your behalf, you need a data processing agreement in place before they start, not afterwards.
- 7
Register the contract with its real key dates
Record the signed contract with its end date, notice deadline, renewal terms and the person inside your organisation who owns the relationship. Set the reminder against the notice deadline, not the end date, because that is the date you can still act on. According to Loio (2026), 71 percent of contracts are never checked against their agreed terms. A contract nobody has diarised is a contract nobody is managing.
- 8
Book the first review three months out
Put a review in the calendar now, while the contract is fresh. After three months you have enough evidence to judge delivery reliability, quality, responsiveness and invoice accuracy, and you are still early enough to correct course before problems become habits. Use the outcome as the first entry in an ongoing supplier evaluation record, so that renewal decisions later rest on evidence rather than on how the last phone call went.
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