How to vet and onboard vendors on Starch

Vendor onboarding is the gap between a verbal agreement and a vendor who's actually cleared to work. It covers everything in between: confirming insurance and compliance documents, signing contracts, collecting W-9s or banking details, setting up payment terms, and making sure the right people on your team know the vendor exists and what they're authorized to do. Most operators don't have a formal process — they have a collection of email threads, a folder in Google Drive, and a mental checklist that lives in one person's head. That works until it doesn't: a subcontractor shows up on-site without a current COI, a new supplier gets paid before a contract is signed, or an audit surfaces a vendor with no documentation trail at all. What this workflow looks like in practice varies — a construction operator tracking subcontractor insurance is doing something different from a brand tracking supplier certifications or a services firm managing freelance MSAs. The mechanics differ; the exposure from skipping steps doesn't. On Starch, the outcome is a vendor tracker that reflects actual status in real time: which vendors are fully onboarded, which are missing documents, which contracts are expiring in the next 30 days, and which approvals are still open. New vendor requests move through a defined intake and approval sequence without anyone chasing status over email. Nothing clears for payment until the checklist is done.