Otherwise, every small order brings a new creditor with it. CPD accounts, P-cards, and employee expense claims only shift the effort, without reducing it.
Small orders run more efficiently when not every single one results in a new supplier in the system. The bottleneck rarely sits in the actual ordering process itself, but earlier, because even a supplier you only need once goes through the full onboarding process. Your system captures master data, runs a credit check, and creates a creditor that then sits unused.
This onboarding step can be avoided. What matters is the number of new creditors per order, not the number of orders itself.
New supplier onboarding starts with master data such as address, bank details, tax number, and payment terms, which procurement or accounting review before the supplier becomes active in the system. For larger order values, a further check is added, covering sanctions list screening, a credit report, and sometimes a supplier questionnaire. After that, accounting maintains the creditor on an ongoing basis. It changes data, updates bank details, and reviews it regularly according to internal rules.
An example makes this tangible: a case worker often needs several days for the onboarding, because they collect forms and wait for feedback from the relevant department. Only after that is the creditor ready to use, for a single order.
All of this happens regardless of order value: a creditor for an €80 spare part goes through the same process as a creditor for a strategic supplier. The difference only shows up later. The strategic supplier delivers over years, which means the onboarding pays off multiple times over.
The one-off supplier, by contrast, delivers only once. The creditor still stays in the system. It gets reviewed, maintained, and counted in every audit. At the next review, the same question comes up again: whether the supplier is even still needed.
Three approaches keep coming up in practice to avoid full supplier onboarding, because each one only shifts the effort to a different place, none of them eliminates it.
One-off creditor (CPD account). A collective account replaces the individual onboarding: supplier data instead moves manually into the order or directly into the invoice, freshly for every transaction. Accounting then checks every invoice against the entered data instead of checking master data, so the review effort remains and only shifts from onboarding to the invoice.
P-card. A company credit card bypasses supplier onboarding entirely, the payment runs directly, without a creditor. But that also removes control: who ordered what, where, and on what terms only shows up in a later reconciliation. Whoever is responsible for the budget often only sees the expense at month-end, while the supplier data needed for later complaints is frequently missing.
Employee expense claim. The employee pays privately upfront and submits the invoice for reimbursement. Here too, creditor onboarding is skipped. Instead, a new process arises, called expense reporting, with approval and reimbursement as further steps, while negotiated terms and payment periods are absent anyway for an order paid for privately upfront.
All three approaches have one thing in common: they only shift the effort to a different place, from onboarding into review, reconciliation, or reimbursement. The reason lies in the system itself, which often only knows two states: supplier onboarded or supplier rejected. A third state for one-off orders usually doesn't exist. As a result, little changes in the overall process — it just carries a different name.
| Approach | Best for | Limit | |---|---|---| | CPD account (one-off creditor) | Individual orders without permanent onboarding | Review effort shifts into invoice review | | P-card | Fast, small payments without a creditor | Missing control and supplier data | | Employee expense claim | One-off advance payment by employees | No negotiated terms, new expense process |
Management only becomes efficient once two numbers are decoupled: the number of creditors and the number of suppliers. Not every order needs its own creditor. It only needs a path to the goods.
That's exactly what a single, permanently set-up creditor delivers: any number of suppliers can run through it without a new master record arising for each one. The supplier changes from order to order, the creditor stays the same, which reverses the previous order in which every new supplier relationship first left its own administrative trail in the system.
Under the Single Creditor Model, a service provider is onboarded as a creditor in the ERP system once. Every further small order then goes to this one creditor, regardless of which provider actually delivers, and the creditor places the order with the respective supplier in turn.
That's the core idea of the Single Creditor Model: one supplier, one creditor, one consolidated invoice, while agents handle the process in the background. No one-off creditors (one creditor for all one-off requirements, no more supplier onboarding). One supplier for all one-off requirements.
This removes the need for procurement to review new master data, and for accounting to maintain an account that's never needed again after a single order. A new supplier doesn't need new onboarding. It just gets another line item on the one creditor's invoice.
Why this also shortens the wait time for individual orders is covered in the article Why Does a Simple Order Take Weeks?. Where the growing number of suppliers actually comes from is described in the article Why So Many Suppliers?. The full overview of all the levers for occasional purchases is provided by the Practical Guide to Administrative Costs.
Find out how the Single Creditor Model handles small orders without new supplier onboarding: Schedule a call →
