I have seen almost every philosophy a company can take toward its suppliers, and the two extremes break down in nearly identical ways, just from opposite directions.

On one end, I have sat with companies who believe there is no value in talking to their suppliers at all. I have met organizations that were genuinely afraid to tell a supplier when they would get paid, because they worried that kind of transparency would just generate more work. On the other end, I have seen the opposite extreme, where payables outsources almost everything to the supplier. Every invoice, every piece of data entry, has to run through a portal, with no other way in.

Both sound reasonable in a planning meeting. Both fall apart in practice, and I learned exactly how while running AP and AR for the same organization.

We had a massive order, several hundred terminal tractors, and no official purchase order to go with it yet. We needed to get those invoices moving, so we tried logging into our own AR platform to key them in. The system bounced us out immediately. Missing PO. No path forward. So there we were, the people who built the process, locked out of our own system because it had exactly one acceptable way of doing things and our situation did not fit it. We ended up working the problem entirely outside the platform, emailing sales, digging through contracts, doing everything by hand that the system was supposed to handle for us.

That is the failure mode of the rigid, portal-only approach. It handles your well-oiled, high-volume suppliers beautifully, often sixty to eighty percent of your invoice volume without a hiccup. But the moment something falls outside the standard pattern, a missing PO, a one-time supplier, someone who only sends you three invoices a year and cannot remember their login, the system has no answer. It was not built for real life. It was built for the easy case.

The scared-to-communicate approach fails for a different reason, but it fails just as reliably. If you are not giving suppliers visibility into payment status, they are still going to call you. Every time. The only thing you have changed is whether that conversation happens through a tool or through a phone call that interrupts somebody's day. And in my experience, a company's reluctance to communicate usually isn't really about workload. It is a symptom of something else going on underneath, like payment timing they would rather not have to explain, or cash they are holding onto a little longer than they should.

The lesson sits in between both extremes, and it is less about picking a side than about building something flexible enough to handle what actually happens in business. Your platform needs a standard, well-worn path for the suppliers who send you clean, predictable volume. It also needs a way out for the order that does not fit the mold, the supplier who only shows up once, the invoice that arrives before the paperwork does. If your system only has one door, you will eventually find yourself standing outside it, locked out of your own process, solving the problem the hard way while your well-designed platform sits there unable to help.

Build for the eighty percent. But never forget to build an exit ramp for the other twenty, because that twenty percent will show up, usually at the worst possible time.