49/mo customer's procurement wants a vendor form, a tax form and net-60 - is this still worth it

Been through several of these. Taking them in order.

The W-9 is simply the wrong form for you and this happens constantly - it is the default in their system. A W-9 is for US persons. A non-US business supplying a US customer normally provides a W-8BEN-E instead, and there is a W-8BEN for individuals. Reply saying you are not a US person and will provide a W-8BEN-E, and in most cases the AP contact says thanks and swaps the form. Getting this wrong is not cosmetic - without an appropriate form on file they may be required to withhold a chunk of your payment.

The insurance certificate is often a template requirement written for contractors who come on site. Ask which policy and which limits and whether software delivered remotely is in scope. It gets waived more often than people expect.

The security questionnaire is real and will keep coming back. Answer it once, properly, and keep the answers in a document.

The PO number is not negotiable, ever. An invoice without it does not get paid, it gets returned.

Time it honestly, because the first one is always the expensive one. Mine was about five hours: portal registration, the tax form, chasing the right contact twice, and the questionnaire. On 588 that is a terrible hourly rate for year one.

But most of those five hours were answering questions that never change. Keep a single folder with your entity details, tax forms, bank details, the security answers, a data processing description, your uptime story and a short list of subprocessors. The second customer like this cost me about forty minutes.

My line is roughly 1,000 a year for a first-time enterprise process, less if I can see three more customers behind them. Below that I offer card only.

The move nobody suggests: ask whether a card works.

Most large companies have a spending threshold under which a team can just put a subscription on a corporate card with no vendor onboarding at all - it varies a lot, but a few hundred a year is comfortably inside it almost everywhere. Your 588 is very likely under theirs. The person who contacted you went to procurement because that is the process they know, not because it is required.

Ask your champion directly: is there a card your team can use for software under some threshold, because that avoids two months of paperwork for both of us. Half the time they come back with a card the same week.

Did the portal thing last year and the thing nobody warned me about was what net-60 actually means in practice. It does not mean sixty days from your invoice. It means sixty days from when their system accepted the invoice, and acceptance can take a fortnight if anything is off.

My first one was paid on day 74. The second, after I learned to submit on the first of the month and email the AP contact directly with the PO in the subject line, was paid on day 61.

If you are used to cards settling in two days, plan for that gap before you agree to it.

Push back on the insurance, correct the tax form, accept the PO and the terms, answer the questionnaire once and save it. Below about 1k a year, offer card only and mean it.

Fields your invoice needs to survive an AP system, from being bounced repeatedly: your full legal entity name exactly as registered, your address, your tax identifier, a unique sequential invoice number, the invoice date and the due date spelled out, their PO number in its own labelled field, the service period, the currency stated explicitly, and full bank details including the intermediary details if it is an international transfer.

Also put your contact email on it. A surprising number of AP queries die because the only address on the invoice is a no-reply.