Supplier master and accounts payable
Duplicate vendors, remittance conflicts and concentration you cannot see.
A recovery audit, a shared-service consolidation, or a treasurer asking how much of the payment run goes to one corporate group.
Send the vendor master with your own supplier ids preserved. What comes back is which records are one company, which pairs carry contradicting evidence, which records belong to one corporate parent, and which we would not call — each with a citation you can open.
Two pages carry what this one only points at: where assurance stands, and every figure with the population it was measured over.
trust and security →every figure, with its population →On this page
CFOs and finance directors, accounts payable and shared-service centre leads, procurement and vendor master owners, and private equity portfolio operations teams.
Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
How it actually goes wrong
What causes it, what it costs when nobody notices, and the part of it a resolver can reach.
A supplier master is the most duplicated table in most finance systems, and for a structural reason: a vendor gets created whenever somebody needs to raise a purchase order, and the person creating it is optimising for getting the invoice paid this week rather than for the integrity of the master. So the same company arrives as a legal name, a trading name, an abbreviation, a name with the division appended, and a name with a typo, often with different remittance details attached to each because they were collected at different times from different people.
The costs are specific rather than abstract. Duplicate payments, which recovery audit firms are paid a percentage to find years later. Payment terms negotiated with a group and applied to one of its five vendor records. Concentration risk that does not show up because the exposure is spread across records nobody knows are the same company. And a remittance conflict — two records for one company carrying different bank details — which is exactly the shape a payment fraud takes and exactly the shape a legitimate account change also takes, with nothing in the master to tell them apart.
The usual response is a fuzzy match over the name column and a spreadsheet of candidates for somebody to work through. That surfaces the easy pairs, misses the ones whose names diverged, and cannot say anything at all about the ones it flags, so the reviewer is making the same judgement the matcher made, from the same two strings, without any evidence the matcher did not have.
If that reads like your week, create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to see which rows match and which need review. Contact us separately if you want a guided first file.
Start freeFrench electronic invoicing reform
Since 1 September 2026 every French VAT-liable business must be able to receive electronic invoices, and large and mid-sized companies must issue them as well. The customer's SIREN is a required field on the invoice. The French government has published a list of accredited platforms — 101 of them at the time we counted — serving close to ten million affected businesses.
A required national identifier on an invoice is an entity resolution problem wearing a compliance hat. If your supplier or customer master does not carry a correct SIREN, the invoice does not route; and France is the single hardest register in which to derive one from a name, because a third of French companies share their exact name with another live company. The deadline has already passed, so this arrives as an exception queue rather than as a project plan: the rows that route are silent and the rows that do not are the ones on somebody's desk.
The reform and the accredited-platform list are published by the French administration. The name-collision figure is our own measurement over the SIRENE bulk file.
What we do about it
Each of these runs today. Where one needs a column you might not have, or fails in a particular way, the sentence says so.
- 01
Duplicate vendor candidates with evidence, not similarity
A pair that agrees on a registration number or an LEI is decided by an identifier rule and never scored. A pair that agrees only on a name is scored, and if the score sits in the borderline band it goes to adjudication with the register's own evidence rendered into the prompt — each rival candidate's town, status, previous names and legal form. What you get is a decision with the register page attached rather than a candidate list to re-adjudicate yourself. - 02
Remittance conflicts surfaced as conflicts
Where two records we believe are one company disagree on a weak signal — a domain, a phone number — that disagreement blocks the merge and is recorded with the attribute that disagreed named, rather than being averaged away. That is not fraud detection. It is the list of places where your master holds two different answers about one company, which is the input a controls team needs. - 03
Parent concentration, cited per edge
Ownership rides along from the global LEI system's relationship records and, for UK companies, from the persons-with-significant-control register, with every edge stating its basis and its certainty. That matters here more than anywhere: an accounting-consolidation parent and a majority-ownership parent are different claims, and rendering both as one parent field is wrong in a way nobody can see on a concentration report. - 04
A pack whose totals reconcile
Ten identities are asserted and recorded in the manifest, including the partition — every input row lands in exactly one ledger, and the distinct source references equal the rows in. If they do not reconcile, the run exits non-zero, quarantines the action files and writes no completion marker, so nothing downstream can mistake the directory for a finished pack. A file whose row count cannot be reconciled is the first thing a finance team checks. - 05
Licence-aware output
Every exported field carries its licence and whether you may resell it, the attribution notice is generated from the sources the file actually contains, and an unreadable licence reads as not-resellable rather than as permitted. For a shared-service centre handing data to a group entity in another jurisdiction, that is a question somebody will eventually ask.
Which of these is your export?
One export usually sits in three of these at once. Your rate is set by the columns still standing once the names have been stripped back to a comparable form.
Vendor name plus a registration number or VAT number
A registration number decides deterministically once its issuing register is unambiguous. A VAT number is not a qualifying signal here and is not measured as one — the UK publishes no lawful bulk name-to-VAT source, so we refuse it as a tier rather than estimating it.
MeasuredIdentifier tier 100% (317/317).
Vendor name plus a remittance or trading address
The postcode is the part that carries. A full address without a usable postcode behaves as context, which is retrieval evidence rather than an identifying signal.
Measured98.74% (313/317).
Vendor name plus a supplier contact email domain
Strong where the domain is the company's own and misleading where it is a personal or shared mailbox. The pipeline treats an email domain as a digital signal and records a conflicting one as a weak disagreement rather than as a decision.
MeasuredName and website measured 100% (197/197) on individually verified pairs, skewed to large well-known companies.
A French supplier with a name and nothing else
Returns a shortlist far more often than a UK one, and the reason is the register rather than the engine. A third of French companies share their exact name — 1,003 live companies sit on one name. A French file needs a town or postcode column, and with one it measured 2,998 of 3,000 on the postcode tier.
No published rateThis shape has not been measured on a published fixture, so the behaviour above carries no rate.
- Identifier — A company number or an LEI
- 100% 317/317
- Name and postcode — A company name and a registered postcode
- 98.74% 313/317
Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload.
317 live GB companies sampled from the 2026-08-01 Companies House snapshot, with same-name siblings included. Identifier-rich arrivals seed the catalogue before the weaker input shapes are evaluated. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. The whole table, including the shapes this page does not use, with the safety results and an account of what none of it demonstrates.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
Not sure which of these your export is? Create your Free workspace and inspect your own CSV columns. For an assisted composition preview, contact us with the file: we tier each row by its strongest surviving signal before quoting a Sprint.
Start freeFour vendor records, one company, two bank accounts
One pass, in order, including the rows that do not resolve. The interesting rows are always the ones at the end.
Four rows in a supplier master: the legal name with a company number, the trading name with a different postcode, an abbreviation with a contact email on the company's own domain, and a fourth row whose name matches the trading name but whose remittance details differ.
- 01Rows one and three bind to the same company: the registration number decides one, the domain and name decide the other.
- 02Row two joins on name and postcode after the register confirms the trading name as a previous name of the same company.
- 03Row four scores as a match on name, then the guard notices that its domain and phone both disagree with the cluster. Two agreeing weak contradictions block the merge.
- 04The blocked pair is recorded with the attributes that disagreed named, and the row stays on its own entity.
One cluster of three of your supplier ids, one row held separately with the disagreeing attributes named, and a receipt for each decision including the refusal.
Row four might be a fraud, a stale record, or a genuine second entity that shares a brand. We do not know which and we do not guess: what the output says is that your master holds two different answers about one name and here is what disagrees. Deciding which it is belongs to your controls team, with the evidence rather than without it.
That example is ours. The one worth having is the same walk-through on eight rows of yours.
Start freePrefer to put it to a person? Talk to us instead →
What this will not do
Each of these is a decision we intend to keep. Read them before you scope the work.
- This is not duplicate payment detection. We tell you which vendor records are one company; matching invoices and payments against each other is your ERP's job and we do not do it.
- This is not fraud detection and must not be sold internally as such. A remittance conflict is a statement that your master disagrees with itself, not a statement about anybody's intent.
- There is no trade payment behaviour, no payment experience data, no credit score and no risk rating, and there is no open equivalent of them — so this will not become available later either.
- Bank account ownership cannot be verified here. Confirming that an account belongs to a company needs a payment service provider or an aggregator feed, and neither is wired into this product.
- Ownership coverage is bounded by identifier adoption. An incomplete ownership path is an absence of coverage, not an absence of owners, and the traversal always reports what it did not walk so you cannot infer depth from an empty field.
- We propose actions and never apply them. Nothing is written to your ERP, your procurement system or your payment run.
We will not tell you how many dangerous merges we will find
We do not promise a count of dangerous merges prevented, and you should distrust anyone who does before they have seen your file. Zero is a normal, honest result: two rows carrying contradicting company numbers are refused outright and never reach the guard that would have counted them.
What this product does not have — no SOC 2, no external validation of the accuracy figures, no customer holdout — is published in full, with the retention, erasure and tenancy detail a security review asks for. Read the trust page →
Check these scope limits before integrating. Free signup lets you inspect your own company CSV; if a requirement falls outside the published scope, contact us and we will tell you whether it is supported.
Start freeThe method behind this, at length
4 articles that carry the working this page summarises.
- GuideHow to deduplicate a supplier masterDuplicate vendors, payment leakage, remittance conflicts and parent concentration. The accounts payable playbook for finding which vendor records are one company, with a citation for every finding.
- GuideCompany identifiers explainedCompany number, LEI, CIK, ticker, SIREN and SIRET, DUNS, VAT, EUID and ISIN. What each identifies, who issues it, what it does not guarantee, and which ones actually decide a match.
- GuideSurvivorship and golden recordsMerging records is only half the job. Field-level survivorship, source precedence, temporal facts, per-field provenance, and why last-confirmed beats first-seen.
- GuideISO 20022 structured address requirementsCBPR+ payment messages are to stop accepting fully unstructured postal addresses. Swift delayed the 14 November 2026 date on 27 August 2026. What changes, and the identity work it forces.
The same pipeline, in other people's words
One product, described 6 other ways. If your team has a different vocabulary for the same file, start from the page that speaks it.
Audit company overlap before a CRM migration
Review duplicate companies across both exports while every source ID is still intact.
CRM and RevOps
Which accounts are one company, which merges to refuse, and a receipt for both.
Master data management
An independent admission policy beside the platform you already run.
KYC and onboarding
Counterparty identity with a receipt that survives seven years.
Reference data
Every identifier a company is known by, each separately cited — and the ones nobody holds.
AI agents
A counterparty check before the agent acts, and a receipt for what it acted on.
Start with your own company records.
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For a guided review of your file, explore the Merge Safety Sprint →
Questions about supplier master and ap
Will you tell us how much duplicate spend we can recover?
No, and not after we have seen your file either. A recovery figure quoted before anyone has seen your file comes from somebody else's data. What we tell you is which supplier records are the same company, with the evidence behind each decision. Turning that into a recovery figure needs your invoice and payment history, your own definition of a duplicate payment, and a validation step we do not perform. Any recovered amount is your number, measured by you.
Can you check whether a bank account belongs to the supplier?
No. Verification of payee cannot prove account ownership without a payment service provider or an aggregator feed, and we hold neither. What we can do is resolve the counterparty behind the account — establish which registered company this vendor record actually is, with a citation — so that the account check your bank or your treasury system performs runs against a registered company that has actually been identified, rather than against a name typed into a form.
How does this handle a supplier that changed its name?
Well, because previous names are register facts rather than inferences. Companies House and several other registers publish former names with validity dates, and those are stored as facts on the entity with their own provenance. So a record raised under the old name and a record raised under the new one resolve to one company, and the receipt shows the register page that carries both. This is a case string matching handles badly and a register handles trivially.
Does this work for our non-UK suppliers?
Per register rather than per continent, and the list is short. Measured registers are the United Kingdom, the United States via Colorado and via SEC filers, France and Norway. Adapters for Finland, Czechia and Poland are wired but have no evaluation fixtures, so they carry no measured quality figure. Germany is a hole rather than limited coverage — there is no lawful bulk source — and Delaware sells no data at any price. Combined three-region parity against the UK baseline measured 0.999955 against a 0.9565 bar at zero model spend, over United Kingdom, United States (Colorado) and EMEA (France and Norway). Outside those registers there is no measured quality to quote.
What is the smallest useful first run?
A few thousand rows of the real master, not a curated sample. A curated sample proves the easy rows, and the interesting rows are the ugly ones. Have us run the free preview over the whole file first — it calls no model and no registry, spends nothing, and tells you which of your populated columns are unusable and why — then run a slice through the cascade and check the results by hand against the register pages cited on each decision.