Regardless of the nature of your business, vendor management requires you to navigate complex relationships, contracts, and compliance requirements.
The worst part? The purchase process can get complicated without the right tools, leading to increased costs and missed opportunities.
This is where using vendor list templates in Excel makes a significant difference. These templates provide a structured way to organize, monitor, and analyze vendor information, helping you make informed decisions and boost your procurement processes.
In this blog, we’ll explore the key elements of a good vendor list template and the top free templates that assist in optimizing vendor management.
Free Vendor List Templates in Excel for Efficient Management
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Makes a Good Vendor List Excel Template?
When it covers all the bases, a preferred vendor list template can optimize your purchase processes and improve your ability to manage vendor relationships.
An effective vendor list template (Excel or Google Sheets-based) is structured, customizable, and easy to use:
- Structured layout: Select a vendor list template with clearly defined rows and columns to make it easy to navigate through and input data
- Essential fields: Choose a template that features necessary fields such as vendor name, contact information, payment terms, performance reviews, and other important information, allowing you to manage and store key information in one place
- Customization options: Prioritize a vendor list template that allows you to customize sections in the template according to specific business needs
- Data analysis features: Your preferred template should have tools to sort and analyze vendor data per your requirements, enabling you to make informed decisions about contract renewals
- Integration capability: Opt for a free vendor list template you can seamlessly integrate it into your current workflow system and save valuable time and effort
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest 7 Vendor List Excel Templates
Here are some of the top free vendor list templates that streamline and enhance your vendor management efficiency:
1. Vendor List Template by Vencru
Vendor List Template by Vencru offers an uncomplicated, customizable, and user-friendly solution for managing vendors. Create a comprehensive overview of the master vendor list with this vendor list template to manage vendor tracking and vendor relationships more effectively.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- All your vendor information consolidated in one place
- Nine customizable fields to suit the particular needs of your business
- Sharable with your team for seamless communication and collaboration on vendor-based tasks and contract dates
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is ideal for procurement teams and business managers who want to optimize vendor tracking and consolidate supplier information for efficient management.
2. Vendor List Template by Hubspot
The Vendor List Template by Hubspot is a useful tool for organizing information about and tracking the vendors from which you regularly purchase products or services.
As a vendor contact list template, it provides a clear and concise format for keeping track of vendor details and all available contact information.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Unique IDs for all the vendors in your approved vendor list
- Allows adding the vendor POC name and details along with the vendor name
- Simplifies communication and helps you place repeat or new orders with ease
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is great for vendor managers and organizations wanting to organize and maintain a comprehensive list of approved vendors to simplify purchasing processes.
3. Simple Price Comparison Sales Chart Excel Template by WPS
Deciding which vendor is best suited to your budget is a time-consuming process. However, the Simple Price Comparison Sales Chart Excel Template by WPS makes the process a breeze.
This vendor price list template includes individual price and quantity columns for each vendor from your approved list. Use them to understand the costs associated with each of your current vendors.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Calculates the subtotal cost of all the items from a vendor, along with tax and shipping fees
- Vendor comparison across prices and quantities for the services provided
- Helps you identify and shortlist the vendors your organization should do business with
Ideal use case ☑️
This vendor list template is ideal for procurement teams, finance teams, and small business owners. It helps them compare vendor prices and quantities and identify the best options for their budget.
4. Supplier Comparison Table by WPS
As the name suggests, the Supplier Comparison Table by WPS offers an efficient and organized way to evaluate suppliers side by side.
This customizable template allows you to assess suppliers based on key criteria, including product/service description, consumer market, number of offices and production institutions, and ownership type!
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Enables conscious decisions regarding supplier selection and procurement processes
- Customizable details such as pricing, product/service quality, etc.
- Works well across various devices, including Windows, MAC, and Android
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is useful for vendor managers, HR leads, and businesses that want to evaluate and compare suppliers side by side based on key criteria to make decisions about supplier selection.
5. Supplier Database Template by Weproc
Manage your suppliers with ease with the Supplier Database Template by Weproc. Fully customizable and user-friendly, this template allows you to maintain a centralized record of all the crucial information about your suppliers.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Statistical indicators to monitor suppliers’ performance and limit supply chain risks
- Dedicated feedback column to rate each supplier
- Custom Fields for an easy contract management overview for suppliers
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is a great option for purchasing managers and business managers looking to maintain a centralized record of supplier information and performance evaluations.
6. Warehouse Inventory Template by Microsoft
The Warehouse Inventory Template by Microsoft is a useful tool for businesses requiring inventory and vendor management.
Identify and locate inventory in seconds with fields such as stock keeping unit (SKU), bin number, location, and inventory value.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Data retrieval on particular inventory bins as and when convenient
- Reminders for reorders
- Customizable with photos, fonts, animations, videos, and other graphics
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is perfect for inventory and procurement managers who want to manage inventory alongside vendor relationships and optimize stock tracking and reorder processes.
7. Wholesale Vendor Management Template by BlueCart
The Wholesale Vendor Management Template by BlueCart offers a complete solution for wholesalers looking to improve their vendor management efficiency.
For hassle-free vendor and supplier management, use any of the four sheets attached to this Google Sheets-based template—vendor registration form, vendor contract template, request for vendor proposal, or vendor change order form.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Unique vendor change order form to change order quantities
- Integrated form for registering new vendors
- Included template for creating vendor contracts
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is ideal for wholesalers looking to optimize their vendor management processes, from vendor registration to contract management.
Summarize this article for me pleaseLimitations of Using Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets for Vendor Management
While free spreadsheet templates often prove handy for managing different vendor information aspects, they have limitations. Here’s some of them:
- Performance issues with large datasets: As your vendor list grows, managing data in Excel becomes cumbersome. Large spreadsheets in Excel or Sheets slow down loading times, making it difficult to find the information you need quickly. In addition to performance lags, large spreadsheets increase the potential for data corruption
- Lack of error-checking features: Unlike premium vendor management software, most spreadsheet templates have limited capabilities to spot errors. If a team member makes a simple mistake in a formula or mistakenly adds an incorrect value for the total cost price of products or services, these errors won’t get flagged. Such oversights lead to serious financial consequences and faulty decisions
- Shortage of automation features: Another significant drawback of Excel/Sheets vendor templates is their inability to automate simple tasks. This means you will need to update order status, contract dates, and other critical data manually, which is tedious and time-consuming, leaving you with little time for other important tasks
- Inadequate security measures: An Excel-based vendor list template will provide basic security features like file encryption and password protection. The lack of advanced security features leaves your vendor database vulnerable to breaches, hacking attempts, and other cyber threats, compromising the confidentiality of your sensitive data
- Absence of advanced features: Excel and Sheets lack advanced functionalities essential for effective vendor management. Unlike dedicated software, Excel does not support automated alerts for procurement contract renewals, performance tracking dashboards, or in-depth data analysis, affecting your ability to operate processes and make sound decisions
Summarize this article for me pleaseAlternative Vendor List Excel Templates
If you want to manage vendors without the limitations of typical spreadsheets, several better alternatives are available. One such example is the templates provided by the project management platform ClickUp.
ClickUp’s wide range of highly customizable templates, from vendor registration and RFI templates to vendor list and purchase order templates, enhance your operational efficiency. Moreover, ClickUp offers scalable tools, from ClickUp Docs to ClickUp Brain and Automations, to help optimize vendor management.
Let’s explore some of the top vendor templates offered by ClickUp that you could access for free:
1. ClickUp Vendor Management Checklist Template
The ClickUp Vendor Management Checklist Template helps you evaluate multiple vendors and use key performance metrics to identify the ones you should partner with.
User-friendly and customizable, this spreadsheet-like checklist template allows you to compare vendors across unique fields, such as company viability, logistics department, delivery date management and timeliness, service response, and requirements fulfillment.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Ensures vendors are complying with applicable regulations
- Feedback collection to identify areas of improvement
- Simplified onboarding of vendors
- Features like time-tracking, tags, dependency warnings, and emails to assess risk
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is ideal for vendor managers, HR managers, and businesses that want to assess and compare multiple vendors to identify the best partnerships and expedite their onboarding process.
2. ClickUp Vendor Agreement Template
Define the terms of an agreement between your company and vendors effortlessly with the ClickUp Vendor Agreement Template. With its functionality quite evident from the name, this template ensures the vendor and the organization are on the same page and prevents misunderstandings.
With this free template, specify each party’s rights, responsibilities, and obligations and outline the terms for pricing, delivery, and other baseline expectations.
💡 Pro Tip: Leverage AI-powered tools such as ClickUp Brain to simplify the process of crafting agreements. Based on the prompts, ClickUp Brain generates detailed, tailored content for your vendor agreements in the tone and language appropriate to your business requirements.
. What you’ll love about it ✨
- Helps craft a legally binding vendor agreement that protects both parties
- Reduces the risk of disagreements and legal disputes
- Maintains transparency between both parties
- Ensures compliance with relevant regulations
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is excellent for organizational legal teams and small business owners to establish clear, foolproof agreements that describe rights, responsibilities, and terms between them and the vendors.
3. ClickUp Vendor Master List Template
Monitoring key information about every vendor easily gets overwhelming, so it’s an excellent idea to take advantage of tools like the ClickUp Vendor Master List Template. This template allows you to record, organize, and store important information in a centralized place without wasting time going through different old spreadsheets.
Look up a particular vendor by name, contact details, industry, etc. Plus, you also have the option to collaborate with your team members on vendor management activities.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Helps you build a centralized vendor management database
- Optimizes your vendor management process
- Facilitates smart decision-making about potential vendor selection
- Provides visibility into vendor spending
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is great for vendor managers, single-party and small businesses, and larger enterprises looking to create a structured and centralized vendor database that enhances visibility and aids in strategic vendor selection.
4. ClickUp Vendor Retro Template
The ClickUp Vendor Retro Template enables you to build retros or case studies on every vendor and determine which contracts to renew and which to terminate.
This template helps you evaluate vendors on cost, quality, customer support, etc. Additionally, it enables you to identify and follow trends for key metrics like delivery times, gain insight into vendor performance, pinpoint areas for improvement, and provide constructive feedback to vendors.
💡 Pro Tip: ClickUp Dashboards provides insight into vendor performance and trends at a glance. This tool presents data in various visually appealing charts and graphs, allowing users to grasp key information and patterns in seconds.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Connects SOWs and vendor deliverables so you can see which vendor relationships are working for your business
- Helps design efficient frameworks for addressing issues and setting expectations
- Consolidates information on factors such as cost, quality, customer service, and more
- Facilitates informed decisions about contract renewals
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is ideal for companies that have used multiple vendors on their payroll and need to optimize operations. It helps assess each vendor’s performance comprehensively and promotes informed contract renewals.
5. ClickUp Supplier Audit Task Template
The ClickUp Supplier Audit Task Template is a user-friendly tool for streamlining supplier auditing processes. It ensures compliance with relevant industry standards and regulations and decreases the possibility of costly mistakes and issues.
Use this template to organize supplier audit information, quickly create and assign audit tasks to the right people, and track their progress.
💡 Pro Tip: Simplify the process of audit task management further with ClickUp Tasks. This tool helps you build trackable tasks, group them by tags and statuses, set deadlines and priorities, and finish all your work on time.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Enables creation of supplier auditing criteria
- Helps ensure audit tasks are being executed properly
- Allows you to assess whether suppliers are meeting your expectations
- Provides a clear and transparent audit trail for future references
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is useful for procurement and quality management teams, as it helps them streamline supplier audits and inspections and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.
6. ClickUp Procurement Template
Procurement processes require careful planning and span several stages, starting with the sourcing material stage and ending with the goods received note stage. The ClickUp Procurement Template makes it easy to manage every stage comfortably.
This template enables you to create a standardized, fair, and transparent procurement process. It helps you monitor and track all procurement activities, improve communication with your vendors, and reduce the chances of errors.
What you’ll love about it ✨
- Provides customization options to meet your business’s unique requirements
- Ensures the smooth running of your entire supply chain management process
- Eases collaboration with team members and suppliers for optimized deliveries
- Organizes everything in a no-code database with visualizations
Ideal use case ☑️
This template is great for procurement teams, purchasing managers, and organizations that want to manage the entire procurement cycle, from sourcing to delivery, to secure the right goods at the right prices.
Summarize this article for me pleaseManage Vendor and Procurement Processes Efficiently With ClickUp
Effective vendor management is vital for maintaining good relationships with vendors and securing the right products within the allocated budget.
While tools like vendor list templates in Sheets and Excel make vendor management easier, they have limitations. That’s why you must explore alternative options like the tools provided by ClickUp, which effectively address these limitations and optimize your procurement processes.
ClickUp’s dedicated, user-friendly, and customizable templates for vendor management make handling things from vendor lists to order forms hassle-free. They encourage you to easily manage and track multiple vendors, contracts, and orders.
Sign up with ClickUp and enhance your overall vendor management efficiency today!
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
