Vet the supplier before they are in your roster. Keep the evidence that put them there.
RONA OnboardOne runs a new supplier through one vetted flow: their documents collected and stored, a compliance check that returns pass, fail, or undetermined with the gap named (never a silent pass), an initial scorecard, and a registration step that only fires when the vet passes and you explicitly confirm. Six months later, when someone asks why this vendor was approved, the answer is a record, not a memory.
Run your next supplier onboarding through the flow See a sample vetting verdict
THE PROBLEM
For most SMB and midmarket operators, supplier onboarding is an email thread. The W-9 is in someone's inbox, the insurance certificate expired eight months ago and went unnoticed, the banking details got updated by a reply nobody verified, and the vendor got their first PO before anyone checked a thing. The enterprise answer is an SRM suite priced far beyond an SMB tooling budget, so the middle is empty: form portals that collect documents but decide nothing, or spreadsheets that decide things nobody can reconstruct later. And right now the middle is where the pressure is, the tariff cycle (82% of importers hit by the 2025-26 schedules, 47% losing 10% or more of revenue at execution) is forcing origin shifts, and every origin shift means a batch of unfamiliar suppliers onboarded in a hurry. Speed pressure plus no vetting process is exactly how an unvetted vendor ends up holding your production schedule.
HOW IT WORKS
OnboardOne is fail-closed by construction, not a checkbox portal. You hand it a candidate supplier and their document set (tax form, insurance certificate, certifications, banking details), and it works the onboarding in order. First a roster check, so a duplicate or a previously rejected supplier is caught before any work is done. Then the documents go into a governed store, so every later determination points at a real stored artifact, not an email attachment someone remembers. Then the vet: the supplier is checked against your compliance checklist (document completeness, insurance minimums, framework attestations, banking details matching the legal identity on the tax form), and a check that errors or cannot complete comes back undetermined and blocks registration, it is never waved through. Then the scorecard, an initial rating built from the vetting evidence and recorded on the vendor record. Only then, and only if the vet passed and you explicitly confirm, does the supplier get registered into your roster. Any waiver you grant on an undetermined check is recorded too, so even the exceptions carry their paper trail. And once registered, the supplier flows into SupplierWatch, our on-cadence compliance watch, so the vetting does not go stale the day after it happened.
WHAT YOU GET
For every supplier, one onboarding record you can stand behind: - the verdict, pass, fail, or undetermined per check, with the gap named, - the stored documents, every artifact the verdict points at, captured and governed, - the initial scorecard, rated across document completeness, compliance posture, capacity, and financial signals, on the vendor record from day one, - the gated registration, no supplier enters the roster without a passing vet and your explicit confirmation, and any waiver is recorded, - the continuation, a handoff into the SupplierWatch cadence so the vet stays current.
WHO IT'S FOR
Procurement and ops leads at SMB and midmarket manufacturers, brands, and distributors who onboard suppliers over email and spreadsheets today, first. Then the 3PLs, sourcing agencies, and fractional-ops consultants who onboard suppliers for clients and need a process they can defend. If your supplier base is growing (or the tariff cycle just forced you to re-source), this is for you. If you already run a full SRM suite with dedicated vendor-compliance staff, or you add one supplier a year, it is not.
PRICING (the ladder)
We price the ladder, not a single number, and every number below is a hypothesis we validate with you, not a commitment. - Onboarding pilot, a fixed-price paid proof, we run your next batch of supplier onboardings (or re-vet a slice of your existing roster) through the flow and hand back the verdicts, scorecards, and gap lists before you commit to anything. - Roster metered, per active supplier under management per month, once the pilot proves the vetting holds, with the SupplierWatch cadence included. - Platform, license the onboarding flow into your own stack (built for 3PLs and agencies who run it for clients).
IP is licensed, never assigned. Any step that takes your money is gated and confirmed before it runs, nothing charges silently.
THE PROOF (dogfood)
Honesty first: AYA does not buy steel or fabric, our suppliers are service providers (cloud, LLM API, domain registrars, email hosting). So we dogfood where we actually have vendors: our own providers go through the same flow, their terms and security documents stored, vetted against our own checklist (data handling, uptime terms, breach notification), and scored into a provider roster with the same atoms this product composes. On top of that we run synthetic onboardings with planted defects (an expired insurance certificate, banking details that do not match the tax form) and require the gate to actually block, with each run leaving a verification record. The build left its own receipt too, the deliverable pattern was scored by our quality gate and all six atoms it composes were verified on disk before this page was written.
HONEST NOTE
We would rather under-promise. OnboardOne has been built and structurally verified, the pattern composes six real atoms, the references resolve, and the registration gate is fail-closed by construction. What it has NOT done yet: no external screening feeds are wired (sanctions and denied-party screening, credit checks, insurance-carrier COI verification are real connectors we have not built, and a vet without them is labeled as such in the verdict), no real buyer's supplier batch has been run, and the synthetic planted-defect run is queued, not executed. There is also no supplier-facing intake portal yet, documents arrive as uploads or exports. The first live onboarding batch is the natural next test. Where a check can be decided we decide it and attach the evidence, where it cannot we say undetermined and name what is missing, and an undetermined never quietly becomes an approval. That refusal to fake certainty is the whole point.
Run your next supplier onboarding through the flow
*This page is a specification. The capability it describes is not built yet, and nothing here is a claim that it runs today.*