Supplier
The party you buy from, including the parent group behind a dozen operating subsidiaries you contract with separately.
01 Why it matters
What depends on getting this right
Negotiating leverage, risk concentration and payment-terms discipline are all group-level questions answered from entity-level data. Unresolved suppliers systematically understate how much you spend with anyone.
02 Where it lives
Every system holds a different version
None of these is wrong. Each was built for a purpose and records the part of the entity that purpose needed, which is exactly why resolution is required rather than optional.
| System | What it holds of this entity |
|---|---|
| ERP vendor master | the payable party, the terms and the bank details |
| Procurement / S2P | contracts, catalogues and negotiated prices |
| Accounts payable | what was actually invoiced and paid, including off-contract spend |
| Quality or EHS | approvals, audits and certifications that gate who may supply |
| External data | corporate structure, credit and sanctions screening |
03 Match keys
What actually matches, and what only looks like it does
| Key | How well it works |
|---|---|
| Registration and tax number | The strongest key, and frequently blank in older masters. |
| Bank account details | A very strong duplicate signal, and one that also flags fraud risk. |
| Normalised name plus country | Adequate after cleansing; defeated by abbreviations and legal-form suffixes. |
| DUNS or equivalent | Resolves corporate family trees, which internal data almost never holds. |
04 Survivorship
When two records disagree, which value wins
Survivorship is a business decision, not a technical default. These rules should be agreed with the people who own the data and then applied consistently, because changing them later restates history.
Payment details from the audited source only
Bank details are a fraud target; survivorship must never take them from the most recent unverified record.
Legal identity from the registry
Registered name and number come from external reference data, not from a purchase requisition.
Terms from the contract, not the invoice
Invoiced terms drift; the negotiated agreement is the reference.
Keep every alias
Local trading names must be retained as aliases so historical spend still matches.
05 The cost of not doing it
What stays broken while it is unresolved
Leverage left on the table
Spend with one group looks like spend with six suppliers, so nobody negotiates as the customer they actually are.
Concentration risk invisible
A single point of failure across several subsidiaries does not appear in any risk report.
Duplicate payments
The same invoice paid to two vendor records is a direct, recoverable cash loss.
Price variance unmeasurable
The same item bought at different prices across entities cannot be compared without a resolved supplier and a resolved item.
06 Metrics that divide by it
The numbers this entity carries
07 Questions
Frequently asked
Is supplier resolution easier than customer resolution?
Usually yes, because the population is smaller and registration numbers are more often present. It is also frequently more valuable per record, since spend concentrates in far fewer parties than revenue does.
What should trigger a review rather than an automatic merge?
Any match where bank details differ, or where one record is blocked or under audit. Those are exactly the cases where an automatic merge creates a control failure.
See the duplicates in your own data
We will resolve one entity on your systems, live, and show what the duplicates are costing.