Vendor management systems: Best software options in 2025

With external spend typically accounting for 50% to 80% of a company’s cost base, according to McKinsey & Company, it pays to stay on top of vendor and supplier management. How can you do it efficiently and at scale? Enter vendor management systems (VMS).‍

What are vendor management systems?

A vendor management system automates all vendor-related activities after the procurement process. These activities include documenting vendor details, collecting a W9, and recording vendor data so stakeholders can easily access and discover it across your business. 

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Automating a vendor management workflow has become critical for businesses of all sizes. As businesses grow, so do the number of tools their employees need to do their jobs effectively. BetterCloud recently reported that the average company uses 112 SaaS applications.

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Managing such a high volume of vendors manually is virtually impossible for even the most experienced finance teams. 

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This explosion in SaaS spending has surfaced two key vendor management challenges:

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1. No single source of truth. The finance team often tracks and manages all the associated vendor information, contracts, and documents. This process is riddled with manual work, fragmented data sources, and a lot of time spent on admin.
2. Overspending: SaaS companies are notorious for their opaque pricing. This makes it difficult for finance teams to understand if the quoted price or the price they receive at renewal is fair.

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There’s real demand for vendor management systems that offer a comprehensive view of all vendor details, documents, and transactions. Without straightforward access to these resources, finance teams struggle to confidently make purchasing or renewal decisions.

How can VMS systems help me?

A solid vendor management platform will help you audit—and control—who supplies your business. You’ll be able to modify contracts based on actual needs. You’ll be able to ensure vendor and supplier spending reflects the actual service your team's experience. Many of these vendor management workflows can be automated, including:

Measuring vendor performance

Businesses often turn to contingent workers and external service providers for specific services they can’t access in-house due to bandwidth or budgetary constraints. However, the risk of engaging and onboarding outside parties needs to be balanced with the rewards of high performance. The best VMS systems help you understand how vendors and suppliers deliver on promises. They help you see:

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• If project milestones are being achieved
• If the work or service quality is as expected
• If phased payments are being released too soon

Preventing shadow IT through automated insights

Shadow IT exists when you buy and use unauthorized technology solutions for various business processes across your company. Shadow IT can go unnoticed at first, but as it becomes more widespread, it can cause significant problems, such as overspending, IT inefficiencies, and data risks.

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The right VMS will allow you to automatically identify and collect all your company’s vendors and contract owners in one place and keep them updated in real time.

Streamlining vendor payments

B2B payments are a complex task for modern accounts payable teams. Decades ago, most people who businesses had to pay were at least somewhat local. It was common for vendors to be in the same building as you or at the very least on the same continent. All that has changed with:

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• The growth of highly skilled international supplier bases
• The emergence of alternative payment methods
• The regulatory challenges of cross-border payments

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A vendor management solution that integrates with or complements your financial management software can help you streamline B2B payments and rein in some of this complexity.

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Automatically tracking vendor spend

Keeping track of spending across all your vendors becomes harder and harder as your business scales. Finance teams have the unenviable task of staying on top of this growth to ensure that spending is tracked. This is why good vendor management software can prove so useful. Structured vendor management lets finance teams see:

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• How much money is being spent on individual vendors and in total
• Accurate explanations of the goods or services you’re paying for
• How these payments are being made, whether that is by card, bank, or wire transfer
• Which vendors get paid the most often and at what intervals

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A good VMS will help you track vendor spending in a way that makes it easier to take action on negative or positive trends, such as overpayment or value-for-money. And that should put you in a stronger position during vendor negotiations.

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Managing third-party risks

For CFOs and heads of finance, contingent workforce management is a key aspect of risk management. Because if one of your vendors makes a mistake, it's your business that often has to face the consequences, whether that’s regulatory difficulties, customer complaints, or negative brand effects.

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A VMS can help you prevent this by ensuring you have all the financial and tax documents that vendors need to provide, along with any licenses, certificates, and insurance.

Complying with regulations

When it comes to external freelancers and vendors, initial due diligence is not enough. For example, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency requires all banks to know who their vendors are and to manage any third-party risks that come from working with external suppliers. That means monitoring:

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• The strengths of individual controls
• Compliance with laws for service level agreements
• Performance metrics and other contractual terms

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You should assess critical vendors annually, at least. A VMS can help simplify compliance management, contract management, and much more.

Look out for these features when choosing your VMS tools

If you’re a seasoned head of finance, you already know all about vendor management best practices. You’ll also know which VMS features do little to support these approaches. A modern VMS helps you:

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• See important vendor information and supplier costs in real time
• Check which teams depend most on outsourcing and contingent labor
• Prevent payment bottlenecks at month or quarter-end

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Other features that can prove useful to finance teams tackling high workloads include:

Centralized procurement and approval

When Ramp launched its vendor management platform, we mentioned that most of our customers were managing hundreds of subscriptions at once. And that’s just subscriptions. Many are also managing high volumes of vendors and suppliers, too.

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Procurement can become unwieldy if it’s not bound by a formal process that finance teams and department heads can quickly and easily follow. Look for a VMS that helps you centralize and simplify requests and approval processes in minutes, not weeks.

Automated and real-time vendor expense tracking

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A VMS helps businesses incentivize savings and value-for-money across the organization, whether that’s external consultant spend, SaaS subscriptions, or legal services. Look for a VMS that enables you to:

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• Use category spending controls to stop unapproved procurement before it goes too far
• Help finance teams close their books promptly, with time-saving accounting integrations and proper coding to help you identify which vendors are providing value for money or where others may be underperforming against agreed-upon deliverables  

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Ideally, you can use real-time vendor spending data to do accurate reporting and financial forecasting.

Auto-categorize vendors

It’s hard to know about every vendor and supplier your teams have procured. That’s not good for heads of finance and their people, because it sets the scene for wasteful or duplicate spending. This is why categorizing vendors is so important. A good VMS will help you be more proactive with vendor management, by categorizing vendors by their services and results.

Block certain vendor spend with pre-set rules

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A VMS should integrate with your corporate card so you can set pre-approved spending limits to automatically enforce your company’s expense policies and keep supplier and vendor spending in check. Look out for the ability to set weekly, monthly, and quarterly spend limits, too.

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This is critical for finance teams working in high-growth companies, where demand for vendor support can excel and outpace current processes quickly. It’s also key for SMB owners, who may need to quickly scale vendor lists up or down based on seasonal demand.

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For example, with Ramp, you can issue vendor-specific virtual cards to control spending at the category level, blocking spending on certain marketing activities or capping insurance outlay. You can limit or block spending on individual vendors, too.

18 best vendor management and procurement services to consider

Now that you know what to look for, here are 11 vendor management system examples to consider.

1. Ramp

Ramp’s vendor management platform is the only one that fully integrates with your corporate card, so you can save an average of 5% and receive automatic notifications about cost-saving opportunities. 

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Ramp’s automated vendor management platform can help you simplify and centralize procurement with a seamless approval process that saves your finance team a lot of time while holding your internal project managers accountable. When it’s time to renew with a vendor, Ramp’s Price Intelligence allows you to see how much other businesses are paying for the exact same software product.

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By leveraging data from thousands of transactions, Price Intelligence gives you transparency into competitive pricing, enabling better negotiations and smarter purchasing decisions.

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With Ramp’s platform, you can identify and collect all vendors and contract owners in one place, get notified when the next payment is due, and track how much you’ve ever spent with each vendor.

2. Precoro

Precoro promises to provide cost-effective and easy-to-use procurement solutions to help companies reduce administrative headaches, lower costs, and increase productivity. Precoro’s features include purchase requests, approval workflows, budget management, and inventory.

3. SAP Fieldglass

SAP Fieldglass is a cloud-based VMS that helps organizations find, engage, manage, and pay external workforces. SAP was named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites in 2021.

4. Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper describes itself as “an all-in-one vendor lifecycle management platform” built on vendor management automation, artificial intelligence, and vendor-facing features. Gatekeeper provides an Employee Portal for internal users to request new vendors and compliance reviews, along with a vendor portal for managing tasks such as non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and information security reviews.

5. Beeline

Beeline specializes in managing contingent workforces and external talent. It provides detailed analytics and reporting tools to track supplier performance, mitigate risk, and improve efficiency.

6. Onspring

Onspring is a flexible, no-code workflow automation platform that also includes supplier management capabilities. It is designed for businesses that want to build customized vendor management processes, with an emphasis on automation and reporting.

7. NContracts

Much like Onspring, NContracts promises to help businesses take the risk out of vendor management and stay informed about vendors’ activities, with tools to monitor and communicate any risks to key internal and external stakeholders.

8. Venminder

Venminder describes itself as a recognized leader in third-party risk management. The platform helps businesses organize, track, and report findings on vendors throughout the lifecycle of the relationship.

9. Genuity

Genuity helps businesses manage IT spending, software usage, contracts, and compliance. It promises to help businesses understand more about their cloud, license, and product usage, as well as billing trends.

10. Oracle Procurement Cloud

Oracle’s solution helps businesses manage suppliers, contracts, and procurement in a unified platform. With a focus on automation and transparency, Oracle’s procurement solution offers tools for supplier performance evaluation and risk management.

11. PRM360

The PRM360 website describes this platform as a “robust cloud-based procurement software solution” for procure-to-pay processes. The platform helps businesses create requisitions, manage inventory, track purchase orders (POs), and ensure vendors comply with relevant regulations.

12. Vndly by Workday

Vndly, now part of Workday, is a comprehensive vendor management system tailored for managing contingent labor and contractors. Vndly allows businesses to gain better control over their supplier relationships, improving cost visibility and operational efficiency.

13. Jaggaer

Jaggaer is a supplier management platform that also includes vendor management features. Widely used by organizations looking to streamline their supplier collaboration, Jaggaer helps businesses optimize supplier selection, negotiate better terms, and manage performance.

14. Zycus

Zycus offers an all-in-one supplier management platform with vendor management capabilities. It’s particularly suited for businesses in manufacturing or other industries with complex supply chains. Zycus allows organizations to track and improve their vendor relationships, ensuring that suppliers meet agreed-upon quality standards and delivery timelines.

15. SynerTrade

SynerTrade is a digital supplier relationship management platform that integrates vendor management capabilities. SynerTrade’s supplier relationship management tools enable better collaboration and transparency with vendors, helping companies improve supply chain efficiency.

16. Coupa

Coupa’s procurement management platform includes a range of tools for supplier relationship management. Its real-time analytics help businesses monitor vendor performance and optimize spending. Coupa also allows organizations to prioritize cost control and visibility into supplier performance.

17. Ivalua

Ivalua offers end-to-end procurement solutions with integrated vendor management features. It provides businesses with detailed insights into their supplier base, while its analytics tools allow organizations to track supplier performance and ensure compliance.

18. Ariba

Ariba, part of SAP, is a cloud-based procurement and supply chain management solution. Its vendor management capabilities focus on improving collaboration between buyers and suppliers. Ariba’s supplier performance management and sourcing solutions are particularly useful for businesses that require advanced supplier data integration and reporting features.

Ramp: Vendor management made easy through automation

Vendor management is a challenge. As your vendor list grows, and you start to deal with external partners around the world, it becomes obvious that sound vendor management is an asset, not a liability.

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Ramp’s predictive vendor management and real-time spend analysis can help you handle all vendor relationships with confidence. Ramp allows you to stop shadow IT, track all vendor spend, analyze upcoming spend, make your procurement process smoother, control vendor spending with cards, and prioritize more favorable vendor contracts.

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Learn more about how Ramp can give you better visibility into your spending and help you save money.