- A supplier portal asks every vendor to maintain a password for one of their many customers. Most will not, so the documents arrive by email anyway.
- Signing vendors in with just their email, with no password to set or forget, removes the friction and keeps the structure: the file lands against the right vendor, requirement and expiry date.
- RakuOps users are unlimited on every plan, so covering a hundred suppliers costs nothing extra.
When the portal is friction, the vendor emails the certificate to the buyer, who saves it to a folder, who leaves the company. The requirement was met once and is now unprovable.
Why vendors do not use your portal
From the vendor's side your portal is one of thirty. Each has a different password policy, each expires credentials, and each is used a few times a year. The rational response is to ignore it and email the document to their contact, which is exactly what happens.
Ask for one thing, and make signing in trivial
- Email is the sign-in. The vendor is added with their email address and signs in with a link sent to it. There is no password to create, expire or reset.
- Scoped to the request. They see the current request, for example the insurance certificate, and nothing else of yours.
- Structured on arrival. The file is attached to the vendor, the requirement and an expiry date, not to an inbox, and recorded against the named person who sent it.
- Chased automatically. No reply by the due date escalates without a buyer remembering.
Expiry is the part that pays for itself
Most vendor document problems are not missing documents, they are expired ones. Because the record holds an expiry date, the next request can go out before the certificate lapses rather than after somebody notices at an audit.
Declarations and sign-offs work the same way
Quality declarations, conflict-of-interest statements, code-of-conduct acknowledgements and corrective-action responses are all the same shape: a request to one named person, completed once, recorded with their name and a timestamp. None of them justifies a password.
What it costs to cover every supplier
Nothing per vendor. On every RakuOps plan, only the number of sites counts towards your limit; users are unlimited. A hundred suppliers responding to document requests are free, which is what makes covering the long tail of small vendors realistic rather than just the top twenty.