Define the decision before collecting documents
A supplier due diligence checklist should help procurement decide what remains unresolved about a specific supplier. Begin with the contracting entity, the service being purchased and the person responsible for the relationship. Group branding and a trading website are not enough to establish the legal party.
This checklist covers company-record due diligence. Combine it with the operational, information security, contractual and other checks required by your procurement process. Do not treat a completed company profile as a completed supplier assessment.
1. Confirm the contracting entity
- Capture legal name, registration number, country of registration and internal supplier ID.
- Compare the proposed contracting party with the purchase order and existing vendor master.
- Check the recorded status and distinguish a registered office from an operating or delivery address.
- Resolve similar names and multiple entities using identifiers before accepting a match.
For an international group, ask which entity supplies the service and which entity appears on the contract. A group company’s record does not automatically describe the entity you will pay. Record the reason for the match, especially when the supplier trades under a different name.
2. Review shareholders and corporate relationships
Inspect available direct shareholders and identify whether they are individuals or companies. Follow corporate identifiers where the dataset supports them. Separately record the immediate parent, domestic ultimate and global ultimate relationships. A shareholder, an accounting parent and an ultimate beneficial owner are different concepts.
Look for common owners or parents across your supplier portfolio. A shared corporate connection can justify a concentration review, but it does not quantify operational dependency or prove that suppliers share the same delivery infrastructure. Keep those questions open for the supplier owner.
3. Inspect directors and recorded roles
Record the current officer names, roles and available appointment or resignation dates. Compare against the previous successful review when history is available. An added name is a reason to inspect the appointment record, not a conclusion about the person.
If a name also appears in another company, confirm identity before treating it as a cross-company connection. Common names, limited birth information and country differences can make person matching ambiguous.
4. Check the available financial filings
Capture the filing date, reporting period, currency, units and whether the statements are consolidated. Compare like-for-like figures only. A parent’s consolidated accounts should not silently replace the subsidiary’s own accounts.
When a figure is missing, distinguish an unavailable filing, a statement that does not disclose the item and a retrieval problem. A missing revenue field is not zero revenue. Record the follow-up needed from the supplier rather than estimating an answer without a basis.
5. Use a review worksheet with clear outcomes
| Check | Evidence to retain | Outcome to record |
|---|---|---|
| Legal-entity match | Country, identifier and source reference | Confirmed / unresolved |
| Company status | Recorded status and source date | Reviewed / follow-up needed |
| Ownership | Shareholders, relationship definitions and gaps | Sufficient for this review / incomplete |
| Directors | Available role and appointment records | Reviewed / identity query |
| Financial filings | Period, currency, scope and available statements | Comparable / not comparable / unavailable |
| Next review | Owner, cadence and event triggers | Assigned / configuration needed |
Do not reduce all six rows to one unexplained score. Your procurement officer needs to know which checks succeeded, what remains missing and who accepted the remaining uncertainty. Use the downloadable supplier checklist as a starting point.
6. Agree the changes that reopen the review
Choose the company events that matter after onboarding. Examples include a changed company status, a new corporate shareholder, a parent relationship change or a newly available filing. Define the evidence required and the person who should assess each event.
Monitor the service as well as the companies. Unmatched entities, failed checks and long periods without a successful retrieval need their own queue. Otherwise a quiet dashboard can be mistaken for an unchanged supplier portfolio.
Test the checklist on difficult records
Include a supplier with multiple local entities, one with incomplete ownership disclosure, a recently changed director record and a company without comparable financial periods. Ask reviewers to complete the worksheet independently. Differences in their conclusions expose unclear criteria.
The checklist is useful when another colleague can reproduce the match, understand the evidence and continue the review. Measure the work required to resolve exceptions, not just the number of completed profiles. CompanyDelta’s supplier intelligence workflow connects those company records and changes to an assigned review.
Questions about supplier due diligence
Is vendor due diligence different from supplier due diligence?
Procurement teams often use vendor and supplier interchangeably. In other contexts, vendor due diligence can describe work prepared for a business sale. This guide addresses procurement review of a supplier’s company records.
Does a corporate link prove supplier concentration?
It identifies a recorded relationship that may warrant investigation. Quantifying concentration also requires your spend, service dependency and operating information.
Should we reject a supplier with incomplete ownership data?
An incomplete record tells you what remains unknown. Route the gap through your organisation’s review policy and request additional evidence where necessary; absence of a field alone does not establish a negative fact.