Procurement & Vendor Vetting

Three plays inside Procurement

This playbook splits across three named signal families designed to slot into a procurement lifecycle. The anchor IDs are stable, link directly from your sourcing system, your ERP gates or your quarterly vendor-review runbook.

Vendor Vetting

The single highest-leverage moment in any procurement relationship is the day before contract signature. Once the ink is dry, due-diligence costs ten times more. Vendor Vetting is the pre-signature surface: a single score that tells you whether the prospective supplier is operationally what they claim to be.

For every UK company we expose:

• Filing-stability score — A–F roll-up of the 41 stability checks we run on every iXBRL filing. The headline number procurement systems consume.
• Virtual Office cluster grade — Headquarters / Co-working / Mailbox. Distinguishes operating businesses from brass-plate registrations at mass-virtual-office addresses (Shelton St, 128 City Rd, etc.). See the Virtual Office Risk Index for the full methodology.
• Pitch-vs-reality delta — when a sales deck claims £8M turnover and the iXBRL filing shows £4.2M, we surface the gap. Particularly common in mid-market UK technology and services suppliers.
• Director-history overlay — pattern of director resignations, prior administrations, beneficial-ownership shifts. Cross-referenced against PSC filings.
• Audit-qualification flag — going-concern statements, qualified-opinion filings, unusually frequent audit-firm rotations.

Procurement gates typically set a B-or-above threshold for new suppliers and a Headquarters-or-Co-working threshold for the Virtual Office cluster grade. Combined, those two filters remove ~20% of post-contract delivery failures from teams that have measured.

The output is one signed score per vendor. Procurement systems consume it like any other Pulse signal — JSON, CSV, webhook — and use it as a hard gate or an escalation flag depending on contract value.

Concentration Risk

The second-most-expensive procurement failure mode is concentration-risk blindness — discovering, after a vendor goes down, that you had three of your top-ten suppliers all sourcing components from the same upstream entity, or all registered at the same beneficial-ownership cluster, or all running identical staff-cost compression patterns at the same time.

The Concentration Risk surface checks every vendor in your watchlist against the population for:

• Beneficial-ownership overlap — multiple “different” suppliers ultimately owned by the same parent, fund or PSC cluster.
• Registered-office clustering — vendors registered at the same mass-virtual-office address (a common pattern in shell-supplier fraud cases).
• Sectoral synchrony — vendors in different SIC codes whose iXBRL signals correlate above the population mean (often indicates shared upstream dependencies).
• Geographic concentration — vendors clustered in regions running materially below the London benchmark (the regional benchmarks feed the surface).

The output is a network view of your vendor base, with concentration scores on the edges. Risk teams typically use it for board reporting; procurement teams use it for vendor-portfolio rebalancing.

Filing Stability Monitoring (post-contract)

Once a vendor is signed, the procurement question shifts from “is this vendor what they claim” to “is this vendor still healthy?” Filing Stability Monitoring is the post-contract surface — continuous re-grading the moment a watched vendor files anything new with Companies House.

The signals we surface:

• Real-Time Margin Shift — year-on-year operating margin movement. The flagship event family.
• Staff-cost cliff — any 15%+ YoY drop in the staff-cost line, the leading indicator of service-delivery risk.
• Current-ratio decay — falling current ratios are the single most reliable cliff-edge tell, ~12 weeks ahead of default.
• Director-resignation cluster — three or more resignations inside 90 days.
• £10.2M threshold crossing — same-day alert when a watched vendor crosses into Medium reporting. See a live example sitting just under the line: Aber Instruments Limited, a £10.2m Shropshire firm.
• Going-concern flag — fires the moment an audit qualification appears.

Each signal fires via webhook as soon as the underlying filing is parsed. Procurement teams typically wire them into Slack, Microsoft Teams or directly into the vendor master data record.

Wiring it in

We deliver the Procurement surface three ways, identical across all three plays above:

• Daily 06:00 GMT CSV — for procurement, audit and category-management teams running quarterly vendor reviews.
• Webhook — for ERP and sourcing systems that need real-time alerts (Coupa, Ariba, Workday, Oracle Procurement Cloud).
• JSON API — for embedding into vendor-master enrichment pipelines and CRM-driven onboarding flows. See the Daily Signal API for the schema.

Every record cites the originating Companies House filing reference, so audit teams can verify any signal end-to-end.

What this is not

• Not a substitute for the actual contract review. The Procurement surface is the data layer your legal and category teams act on. It doesn’t write the SLA.
• Not adversarial. Grades and signals are delivered privately to the requesting buyer. We do not publish league tables of UK suppliers.
• Not a replacement for credit bureaus. It’s the layer above. Bureaus tell you the credit history; the Pulse tells you what’s happening in the underlying iXBRL filings this morning.