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Vendor onboarding requests

What are onboarding requests?

Onboarding requests are an information gathering mechanism. When starting the process of monitoring a new vendor, you can use it to collect information about your organization's engagement with the vendor. This information should be designed to inform the appropriate level of depth required to assess the vendor.

Onboarding questionnaires can be configured via Settings > Vendor Onboarding, or via the prompt when you monitor a new vendor. When you send an onboarding request, the results are stored in the Vendor Summary page. Clicking on the onboarding request summary on the Vendor Summary page allows you to see the details of the request, and take other actions such as re-sending or archiving.

You can automatically apply labels, tiers, portfolios and custom attributes, based on the request's responses. Visit How to use automation to apply tiers, labels, portfolios and custom attributes to your vendors to learn more.

When to use onboarding requests

There are 3 primary use cases for sending an onboarding request:

  1. If you are in charge of your organization’s third party vendor management and receive a request to conduct a security assessment on a new vendor. You can send an onboarding questionnaire to the internal business owner that will capture and store details of the business engagement. This might include things like whether the vendor has access to customer or employee Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for example, which would inform you that a rigorous risk assessment is required.

  2. If you are onboarding a new vendor and want to capture information about the specific business relationship. In this instance, you can assign yourself as the recipient and fill out the questionnaire to create a record of the business relationship with this particular vendor, which you can review at any time on the Vendor Summary.

  3. If you want to gather information about the business relationship to automatically populate labels, portfolios, tiers or custom attributes. You can do this at any stage in your business relationship with the vendor, by configuring automation rules and then completing an onboarding request.

Configure the onboarding request questions

  1. Click the Settings icon in UpGuard's top-right corner.
  2. Click the Vendor Onboarding tab.
  3. Click Set up now.
You will start with default onboarding request questions which we built as a starting point for your organization to customize as required. You can choose to publish or edit this questionnaire using our questionnaire builder.

From here you will be able to test the questionnaire's functionality, or select Create draft to open up the questionnaire builder and customize your company’s questionnaire.

For help using the questionnaire builder to customize the onboarding request questionnaire to your organization’s needs, visit ‘How to use the questionnaire builder’.

Within this same view you can configure automation rules to populate portfolios, labels, tiers and custom attributes with the answers from the questionnaire, saving you time and reducing manual effort.

Once you are happy with the set of questions, select Publish. This will update the onboarding request questionnaire for all users in your account.


How do I send an onboarding request?

For a new monitored vendor

When you identify a new vendor to begin monitoring, you will now see the Monitor Vendor screen, which will include the onboarding request and whether you wish to send this now. If you have not set up onboarding requests for your organization, you will be prompted to review the questions. Simply follow the prompts to review the questionnaire, update/save the questions and enable the feature.

If you have previously configured onboarding request questions, you can elect to send a request now, as you monitor this new vendor. If so, you can choose the internal recipient(s), add a message, and edit/preview the request's content.

Once you hit Monitor Vendor in the bottom right corner, the onboarding request will be sent to the designated recipient.

For an existing monitored vendor

To send an onboarding request for a vendor that you already monitor, simply navigate to a Vendor Summary page and select Onboarding request under Company Profile.

This will send you to the ‘Send onboarding request’ page where you can edit/preview your request, add a recipient and customize the message.

Send onboarding requests via API

You can initiate an onboarding request to a nominated email address via an API call, allowing non-users such as business owners to trigger onboarding requests from outside of the platform, streamlining procurement and vendor assessment processes.

To send an onboarding request via the API, you first need to ensure that the onboarding questionnaire is already set up and enabled in UpGuard. Then, to send an onboarding request the vendor needs to be already monitored in UpGuard or monitored by a separate API call ,Start monitoring a vendor request.

To learn how refer to our API documentation.

Find onboarding requests?

Click ‘Onboarding requests' on a Vendor Summary page to see more detailed information on a request's status or fill it out if you assigned it to yourself.

Within the onboarding request's details page, you can view any pertinent details for the request such as the timeline, any correspondence, a status indicator. You can also continue to answer the questions, if you are the recipient.