The new finance leader's survival guide to vendor management

You didn't build this vendor stack, but you still own it.

Someone handed you a spreadsheet and called it a vendor list. It was wrong;  missing the tools purchased on a corporate card last Tuesday, silent on the contracts behind those charges, nothing about the $80,000 auto-renewal sitting 45 days out that nobody has looked at since the person who signed it left.

This is what every new finance leader inherits: relationships they didn't create, contracts they've never read, and spend they're now accountable for.

What's inside:

• Where your vendor picture actually lives — and why no single system has all of it (AP, corporate cards, expense reports, SSO, and the one conversation most new finance leaders forget to have)
  
  
• The six contract fields that matter — and how to find them across shared drives, email inboxes, DocuSign, and vendor portals before a renewal deadline forces your hand
  
  
• The non-renewal default: the single highest-ROI action in this entire playbook, it costs nothing, takes five minutes per vendor, and prevents the most common source of wasted spend
  
  
• The three-pillar operating model that keeps your vendor landscape from drifting back toward chaos after the 90-day sprint is done