For some property management firms, vendor management is little more than collecting a vendor’s W9 and certificate of insurance and tucking these documents away in a file. If that sounds like a familiar modus operandi, you may be exposing your company to serious risk.
Until recently (about six years ago), a comprehensive vendor and contractor risk management solution didn’t exist. Effective vendor risk management was a piecemeal undertaking, where many pieces—particularly ongoing ones, such as ensuring compliance with ever-changing government regulations—often fell to the wayside, and sometimes with disastrous results for property managers (or those with investments in the incompliant properties).
In 2012, an elite group of professionals with decades of experience in risk management pooled their skills and resources and established Enterprise Risk Control (ERC), the first-of-its-kind comprehensive risk management and background screening solution that is, according to them, “intuitive, effortless, and customizable beyond your wildest expectations.”
And so, it was with such expectations that we began to work with ERC and, even for us—who pride ourselves on our knack for pushing the limits of creative software customizations—we quickly realized the incredible value of the ERC platform and the enormous benefit its use would serve our clientele.
ERC’s advanced technology can guarantee up-to-date, incredibly accurate monitoring of all your vendors’ compliance, including those related to:
- Insurance certificates (including quarterly verification of active status)
- Credentialing (including bankruptcy, liens, judgments, and professional licenses)
- Immigration regulations
- W9 documentation and tax ID verification
- Criminal and sex offender screenings
- Government watch list screenings, including those related to the PATRIOT Act, Money Laundering Act, Executive Order 13224, and Fair Credit Reporting Act
- Vendor diversity documentation
And that doesn’t even begin to touch on their cutting-edge electronic data storage and management services, advanced reporting, notification alerts, and other top-notch services. Plus, the cost and time required is minimal—you pay nothing while your vendors pay a small annual fee—and the potential savings is incalculable.
Considering early autumn is usually prime time for budget considerations, now is the opportune moment to reconsider your current vendor management practice—particularly if it consists of a dusty file cabinet in your accounts payable department. Vendor compliance—or, perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof—can snowball into major financial and legal trouble that no real estate property management firm can really afford.
