The customer
A ₹200 Cr turnover mid-market manufacturer headquartered in northern India, with three plants and ~3,200 active vendors across raw materials, packaging, logistics, MRO, and capex. AP team of 8. Internal audit team of 3 with a quarterly cycle.
The problem
In Q1 of last year, the customer's GST consultant reverted ITC on 14 vendors whose GSTINs had been suspended mid-quarter. The total reversal was ₹38 lakh. The deeper problem surfaced during root-cause: of 3,200 vendors on the master, the team had no idea how many were still actively compliant. The spreadsheet hadn't been refreshed since onboarding.
Internal audit had flagged this for three consecutive cycles. Each audit cycle, the AP team spent the better part of a month manually re-verifying a sampled subset on the GST portal, MCA portal, and via penny-drops. The sample was never the right sample — it was the alphabetically-first 200 names.
The solution
The customer onboarded onto the Growth tier. The vendor master was exported from Tally Prime via the prebuilt connector; the 3,200-row file landed in Sahayak in under a minute. The first full-batch verification finished in 11 minutes — slightly above the headline number because the master had a long tail of state-licence-heavy vendors that hit Shop & Establishment portals on the slow end.
The risk-scored grid surfaced 187 high-risk and 412 medium-risk rows. The AP head & the internal-audit head jointly defined a triage workflow: high-risk → freeze pending re-KYC; medium-risk → 7-day notification to the procurement owner; low-risk → continue. Re-checks were scheduled monthly with Slack alerts to a #vendor-watch channel.
The results
- • Vendor master coverage went from "alphabetically-first 200" to 100% of 3,200 vendors monthly.
- • 22 directorship overlaps were surfaced (same DIN across 4+ supposedly-independent vendors) — none had been spotted earlier.
- • Internal audit moved from "monthly re-verification" to "review of exceptions surfaced by Sahayak". Cycle shortened by 4 weeks.
- • The CFO took the PDF audit report to the board's audit committee. Sahayak now appears as line-item infrastructure.
In their words
[Customer quote pending — head of internal audit, approved verbatim text once company name is cleared.]
— Head of Internal Audit, anonymised; quote attribution will be added when permission lands.
What we'd do differently
In hindsight, we should have run the directorship-overlap sweep on day-1 of the pilot rather than 30 days in. The overlap finding was the moment the customer changed from "interested" to "champion"; surfacing it earlier would have compressed the sales cycle. The product now does this automatically during onboarding.