The documents Indian procurement asks a marketing supplier for, and which ones to have ready before anybody asks

A marketing proposal is approved and then nothing happens for five weeks. In most Indian companies the reason is not the proposal. It is that the supplier is not onboarded, and onboarding is a document exercise that nobody started because nobody asked for it until the invoice arrived. Procurement cannot raise a purchase order against a vendor who does not exist in the system, and finance cannot pay an invoice without a purchase order. The whole delay is usually two or three papers.

A supplier who keeps a single folder with the universal documents in it gets onboarded in days rather than weeks. The list below is split by how often each item is actually asked for, which is more useful than a long list where everything looks equally important.

Asked for almost every time

Asked for when something about the engagement triggers it

• Udyam or MSME registration certificate. Many Indian buyers' own payment policies treat a registered micro or small supplier differently from a large one, so having the certificate before you are asked can change the payment terms you are offered. If you qualify, register and keep the certificate in the folder.
• Provident fund and employee insurance registration numbers. Asked when your people will work at the buyer's premises or on their systems, which comes up for events, activations, photography and anything on site.
• Insurance certificate. Public liability for events and activations, professional indemnity for consulting and technical work. Asked by larger buyers and by anybody who has had a bad experience.
• ISO or other certification. Common when the buyer is a manufacturer or an exporter with its own certification obligations flowing down to suppliers.
• Financial statements, usually two or three years. Asked above a commitment size, and the purpose is to check you will still exist at the end of the contract.
• Platform partner status. Asked for advertising work, where the buyer wants to know whether you hold a direct relationship with the platform or place through somebody else.
• Client references with permission to call. Asked by almost every buyer above owner managed size, and the quality of the list matters more than its length.
• A tax deduction certificate, where you hold one. Relevant where a lower or nil deduction has been certified for you. Your accountant will tell you whether this applies, and it is their call rather than the buyer's.

Asked for by some buyers and nobody else

• A supplier code of conduct acknowledgement, common in listed companies and multinational subsidiaries.
• Anti bribery and conflict of interest declarations, often annual rather than per contract.
• Registration on the buyer's own supplier portal, which is usually the slowest single step and the one to start first.
• A security or data handling questionnaire, where you will touch customer data. Expect questions about who on your team has access, where it is stored and what happens at the end of the contract.
• Confirmation that you can issue invoices in the format their system accepts, which matters more than it sounds because a rejected invoice restarts the payment clock.

The three questions that save a month

Ask these in the first commercial conversation, before the proposal goes in.

• What does your vendor onboarding need from us, and is there a form.
• Do you work on purchase orders, and who raises them.
• What are the payment terms from the date of invoice, and who signs the invoice off.

Three answers, one email, and the onboarding can run in parallel with the approval instead of after it. Running them in sequence is the single most common reason a marketing engagement starts a month later than both sides intended.

The advertising specific one buyers forget to raise

Where the engagement includes paid media, there is a separate question about who pays the platform. If the client pays the platform directly, the client's registration details go into the payments profile and the agency invoices only its fee. If the agency pays and bills through, the media appears on the agency's invoice and is treated differently by the client's finance team. Decide it before the first rupee is spent, because the billing details on a platform account are hard to change after invoices have been issued. Our page on judging a Google Ads agency in India on account ownership and billing quotes what Google itself publishes about this, and it is the detail to settle on day one.

What goes in the agreement rather than the document folder

Six clauses do more work than the whole document set and they live in the contract. Ownership of the accounts and the logins. Assignment of the intellectual property in finished work, with source files handed over. The exit notice and what transfers on exit. Approval rounds included and the rate for extras. The reporting cadence and the two numbers that define success. And what happens to the buyer's data at the end. Our page on what a marketing agency contract has to contain works through the clause list, and the ownership and exit clauses read the same way wherever the contract is signed.

Questions about marketing vendor onboarding in India

I am a freelancer rather than a company. Can I still be onboarded

Yes, and the list shortens. Entity proof becomes your proprietorship registration or your professional registration, and the rest of the universal list applies unchanged. Many buyers onboard individual professionals routinely.

Do I need GST registration to work with a large Indian company

Large buyers prefer it because of how their own accounting works, and plenty of them do onboard suppliers who are not registered, usually with a written declaration in place of the certificate. Whether you should register is a question for your accountant rather than for the buyer.

How long does onboarding take

Days where the folder is ready and the buyer has no portal. Two to four weeks where there is a portal, a code of conduct and a security questionnaire. Starting it alongside the proposal rather than after approval is what compresses it.

Which single document is most often missing

Bank details on letterhead. Everybody has the account number and almost nobody has it on signed letterhead with the branch details, and finance teams will not accept it any other way.

Should I give client references by name

Give them with the client's permission, by sector rather than by size, and tell the referee they may be called. A short list of three who will actually answer the phone is worth more than ten names.

Can I negotiate payment terms

Usually yes within a band, and the lever is the invoicing milestone rather than the number of days. Invoicing on the first of the month rather than at the end of it moves the payment date without anybody changing a policy.

The onboarding step that has no form

Every document above exists because a buyer wants to verify something about a supplier it has already decided to consider. The step before that, being considered at all, is increasingly done without a form, a portal or a meeting, when somebody describes the requirement to ChatGPT or Gemini and reads back a short list of firms. When we put 198 India buying questions to both engines on 22 October 2026, with the country written into every question, 91.1 per cent of the 1,606 sources those answers drew on were pages on a company's own website, and not one Indian directory or marketplace catalogue appeared among them. That makes your own published pages the document that decides this step, and AI Knows Us measures which way it currently goes.