Vendor Pay

Vendor Pay simplifies business-to-business payments by letting your vendors manage their own payment and tax details online, and by grouping payments into scheduled settlements that you control. This reduces administrative effort, simplifies reconciliation, and lowers payment costs.

Instead of creating individual payments, you create Payment Requests. Vitesse queues multiple Payment Requests for the same supplier and combines them into a single payment on a set settlement interval.

You can use Vendor Pay through Vitesse Online or the Vendor Pay API.

Key concepts

Concept	Description
Payment Request	Adds an amount to a supplier's payment queue. Multiple Payment Requests for the same supplier are grouped into a single Transaction based on a Schedule, while remaining individually identifiable for reporting and reconciliation.
Schedule	Defines when queued Payment Requests are combined and paid to suppliers, e.g. daily, weekly, or on custom interevals. Schedules can apply to all suppliers or to individual suppliers.
Transaction	Represents the payment created on Schedule, grouping the queued Payment Requests and using the stored vendor information to execute the payment.

Payment Request lifecycle

A Vendor Pay Payment Request follows these steps:

You create one or more Payment Requests for a vendor.
On the schedule defined for the vendor, Vitesse groups queued Payment Requests into a single payment.
If the vendor is not already stored or registered, they receive an invitation to create an account and provide their legal, tax, and payment details. An email address and mobile phone number are required to send the invitation.
Vitesse creates a Transaction using the vendor's payment details.
The Transaction is processed and the payment is sent.

📘
The timing of a payment is determined by the schedule that applies to the vendor, not by when the Payment Request is approved.

Additional features

Vendor onboarding

Vendor Onboarding lets vendors securely register when the first payment is due, and maintain their own legal, tax, and payment details through a self-service portal. Vitesse stores this information as a Stored Recipient, ensuring payments always use up-to-date details while reducing the need to handle sensitive data in your own systems.

📘
Even if you do not use Vendor Onboarding, you can choose to store payment details only in Vitesse through in bulk via SFTP or manually on Vitesse online.

Urgent payments

Queued payments are normally processed according to the vendor's schedule. If a payment cannot wait, you can trigger Process Now through Vitesse Online or API to release it immediately, provided sufficient funds are available.

Sufficient fund queue

Vendor Pay ensures that payments continue to be processed even if there are not enough funds to settle every queued payment request.

When a scheduled payment run starts, Vitesse processes Payment Requests in the order they were queued (first in, first out). If the available balance is exhausted, the remaining payments stay in the queue rather than causing the entire run to fail.

After a payment becomes overdue because of insufficient funds, Vitesse checks the account balance every 20 minutes and automatically processes the payment as soon as sufficient funds become available.

Remittance advice

Although Vendor Pay combines multiple Payment Requests into a single payment, each underlying claim, job, invoice, or Payment Request remains individually traceable.

You can access this information in two ways:

Generate your own remittance advice by using Vitesse webhooks to retrieve the underlying payment data and produce a detailed payment breakdown.
Registered vendors can log in to the Vitesse Vendor Portal and view the detailed breakdown for each consolidated payment.

This ensures that suppliers receive a single payment while retaining full visibility of every item included in the settlement.

Credit notes

To create a credit note, submit a Payment Request with a negative amount. Instead of generating a payment, the credit is deducted from the supplier's next scheduled settlement, reducing the total amount paid. If the credit note is bigger than payments, Vitesse holds all payments until the aggregate value becomes positive.

Credit notes are processed using the same schedule as standard Payment Requests and remain individually traceable in the payment breakdown.

Vendor Pay operations

Best practices

Notify the vendor that a Payment Request is expected before sending the secure link, to avoid surprises and maximise completion rates. Monitor Payment Requests and Transactions so that you can respond to incomplete requests or failed payments.

Cancellation and modification

You can cancel a queued payment before its scheduled processing time. To modify a queued payment, cancel it and create a new one with the correct details.

Returned and rejected payments

Vendor Pay payments move through a defined set of Vendor Pay States. Status updates, including returns and rejections, are available through webhook events for API integrations and can also be viewed in Vitesse Online. If a payment is returned or rejected, investigate the cause, correct the issue (for example by updating the vendor's payment details), and reissue the payment.

Duplicate payments

Vitesse can detect duplicate Payment Requests before processing the payment. For API integrations, talk to the Solutions Team for information on configuring idempotency keys and duplicate detection.

Next steps

If you use Vitesse Online, see the Vendor Pay guides for creating and managing Payment Requests.

If you integrate with the Vendor Pay API, see the Vendor Pay Guide and the API Reference.