Onboard suppliers with Connect forms
Build a custom onboarding form, send it to a supplier, review what comes back, and accept the supplier into your directory, all without chasing documents over email.
What you'll learn
- Build a custom onboarding form with the field types you need
- Send the form to a supplier and track their response
- Review submissions and accept suppliers into your directory
Onboarding a new supplier is where good intentions go to die in an inbox. You email asking for their trade licence, their bank details, a signed code of conduct, and three references. They reply with two of the five, a week later. You chase the rest. Each supplier sends their documents in a different shape, and you end up with a folder of attachments and no clean record of who provided what.
Connect replaces that with a structured form you design once and send to any supplier. You decide exactly what to ask, the supplier fills it out through a single link, and every answer comes back in the same format. When you accept a submission, the supplier moves straight into your directory of registered suppliers. No chasing, no mismatched attachments, no rebuilding the picture by hand.
Why this matters
Onboarding is a compliance and record-keeping task disguised as an email thread. A form turns it into a clean, repeatable process: the same questions every time, a complete answer set or none, and an auditable record of what each supplier provided and when. The next time a manager asks "did we onboard this supplier properly?", the answer is one click away instead of a search through your sent folder.
Connect onboarding is always buyer-initiated
You, the buyer, build and send onboarding forms. The supplier receives a form, fills it in, and submits it back to you. A supplier never sends an onboarding form to a buyer. If you are a supplier looking at a form you received, see Respond to an onboarding form.
How Connect works, end to end
Connect has four tabs: Templates, Submissions, Directory, and Requests. The first three map onto the build, review, and approve stages of the onboarding loop described below; Requests is a separate, ongoing surface, not another step in the sequence, see below.
| Step | What you do | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Build | Create a form (a template) with the fields you want to ask for. | Templates tab |
| 2. Send | Send the form to a specific registered supplier. | Open the template, then Send onboarding form |
| 3. Review | Read the supplier's answers and accept or reject them. | Submissions tab |
| 4. Approve | Accepted suppliers join your directory automatically. | Directory tab |
The Requests tab is your inbound Connection Requests: suppliers who found your company on Discover and asked to connect with you. Review and respond to these to build your verified directory the other direction, separate from the Templates/Submissions/Directory loop above, which is the buyer-initiated onboarding flow.
Before you start
A couple of things make onboarding smoother:
- A reasonably complete company profile. Suppliers see your profile when they open your form, so a complete one builds trust and gets you better response rates.
- A clear idea of what you actually need from a supplier. Designing the form is faster when you already know your required documents and questions.
Building an onboarding form
A form is built from fields. Each field has a label (the question), a type (what kind of answer you expect), and a required toggle. VEXORS gives you eight field types so you can ask for exactly what you need:
| Field type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Short Text | A name, a registration number, a single line of text. |
| Long Text | A description, a policy statement, or any multi-line answer. |
| Single Select | One choice from a list you define (for example, a payment term). |
| Multi Select | Several choices from a list (for example, certifications held). |
| Yes / No | A simple confirmation, such as agreeing to a code of conduct. |
| Date | An expiry date, a founding date, or any calendar value. |
| Number | A quantity, a year, a headcount. |
| File Upload | A document the supplier attaches, such as a trade licence or insurance certificate. |
Create a new form and add your fields
Go to Connect in the sidebar and select New Template. Give the form a clear title, add an optional description, then add a field for each thing you want to ask. For every field, write the question as the label, pick the answer type, and mark it required if the supplier must answer it. Single Select and Multi Select fields let you define the list of options.
Fields can also be made conditional: show or hide a field based on the answer given to another field, using an operator appropriate to that field's type (equals, does not equal, contains, is empty, is not empty). Use this to keep the form short for most suppliers while still capturing detail when it is relevant, for example only asking for an insurance certificate number if the supplier answered Yes to holding insurance.
Toggle the form to Active when it is ready to send. You can keep it as a Draft while you are still building it.
Send the form to a supplier
Open the form and select Send onboarding form. Search for the registered supplier by name and send it. The supplier is notified and given a unique link to fill it out. You can send the same form to as many suppliers as you like, and the page tracks how many you have sent it to and how many have responded.
Once a form has been sent to a supplier, its structure is locked. This keeps every past submission tied to the exact questions that were asked at the time. To change the questions, use Duplicate as new version and send the new version going forward.
Review what the supplier sends back
When a supplier submits, their response appears on the Submissions tab. Open it to read every answer in the structured form you designed, and download any files they attached. From there you can Accept the submission or Reject it, optionally with a note explaining why, so the supplier knows what to fix.
Accepted suppliers join your directory
Accepting a submission automatically adds that supplier to your Directory: your maintained list of registered, onboarded suppliers. From the directory you have a clean, ongoing record of everyone you have approved, with their onboarding answers attached.
What the supplier receives
The supplier gets a notification that you have sent them an onboarding form, plus a unique link to open it. They see your company profile (which is why a complete profile matters) and the exact fields you built, with your required fields clearly marked. They fill in their answers, upload any documents you asked for, and submit.
They cannot edit the questions, and they cannot send a form back to you. Their only actions are to complete and submit the form, or to decline it. After they submit, the decision is yours: accept them into your directory, or reject with feedback.
Invite your existing suppliers in bulk
Onboarding forms are for one supplier at a time. If you already have a spreadsheet of fifty or five hundred suppliers you work with today and want them on VEXORS, the fifth Connect tab, Supplier invitations, is built for that instead.
Grow and Scale only
Bulk supplier invitations are available on the Grow and Scale plans. On Explore you can see the tab, with an upgrade prompt in place of the create button.
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1. Create an invitation list | Give the list a name. If your spreadsheet is ready, upload it at the same time, or add it afterwards. |
| 2. Import your spreadsheet | Match your columns to email, company name, contact name, phone and category, then review the rows before confirming. Only email is required. |
| 3. Prepare and send | Choose who the invitations are sent on behalf of, tell your suppliers first from your own mailbox, then send. |
| 4. Suppliers register | Each supplier gets an email invitation, opens a link, and registers a VEXORS account of their own. |
| 5. You choose whom to connect | Once a supplier has registered, you decide whether to connect them to your directory. Nothing is automatic. |
Registering is not connecting
A supplier who registers from your invitation is not automatically connected to you. Registering only creates their VEXORS account. You review who has registered and connect the ones you want, on your own schedule, with no cap on how long you can wait.
If you change your mind, the two options mean different things. Cancelling a list that has started sending stops any further invitations and keeps the list as a record of who was contacted: suppliers who already received an invitation keep it and can still register, and you can still connect the ones who do. Deleting is only for a list that has not sent anything yet: it removes the imported rows and the uploaded file.
Importing a spreadsheet does not connect anyone and does not use any of your supplier limit. Suppliers who bounce, unsubscribe, or are already on your do-not-contact list are handled automatically, so a messy spreadsheet cannot turn into spam complaints against your account.
What good looks like
A form that gets fast, complete responses usually does a few things well:
- It asks only for what you genuinely need to onboard. A 30-field form gets abandoned; a focused one gets completed.
- Required fields are reserved for true must-haves, so suppliers are not blocked by an optional nice-to-have.
- File uploads are labelled precisely ("Valid trade licence", not "Document"), so the supplier attaches the right file the first time.
- You reuse one well-built form across many suppliers instead of rebuilding it each time, which is the whole point of a template.
- When you reject, you leave a note. A rejection with no reason just becomes another email thread.
Next steps
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