Why most vendors still need more than one tool to get paid
Ask a vendor what software runs their back office, and most can name it without hesitation. Ask what else they use alongside it, and most have an answer for that too. For most vendors, the primary tool was never the whole system.
Even the most popular platform isn't the whole system
QuickBooks is the most widely used platform in this space, run by 58.5% of the vendors we surveyed, nearly three times the next closest option. If any single tool were going to be a complete answer on its own, this would be it.
Among the 244 QuickBooks users in this survey, only 45.9% use it by itself. More than a third, 36.5%, run at least one additional software tool alongside it. Another 9.0% still keep paper or a spreadsheet going too, and 8.6% are running all three: QuickBooks, another platform, and paper. Whatever's driving that pattern, it isn't unique to one piece of software. It shows up even for the tool with the largest share of the market.
No single alternative fills the gap either
This isn't a story about vendors picking the wrong tool. No other option comes close to consolidating the market either. Stripe/Square is the next most common choice, at 16.5%. Industry-specific software follows at 15.3%, custom or in-house tools at 12.0%, and the rest, FreshBooks, Bill.com, Sage, Xero, NetSuite, each split off a few percentage points apiece. Vendors aren't quietly coalescing around a better alternative somewhere else. They're stacking tools because no single one covers the whole job.
The job was always bigger than accounting
Accounting software, whichever kind a vendor runs, was built to answer a single-business question: what came in, what went out, and does it reconcile. That's a one-company view of the world, and most platforms handle it well. It's also not where a vendor's real daily friction lives.
The actual friction is in managing a dozen separate client relationships at once, each running its own portal, each wanting the same certificate of insurance formatted or uploaded a slightly different way, each on its own renewal schedule. That's not a bookkeeping problem. It's a coordination problem, and unlike a chart of accounts, it gets more complicated with every new client instead of staying fixed.
None of the following shows up on a balance sheet, and none of it is something accounting software tracks: which of a dozen COIs expires next, which client's portal is still waiting on a resubmitted invoice, or whether the W-9 sent to a new client six months ago is even the current version. It doesn't touch the books. It still eats the week.
"It would be better to have a universal portal for payments and invoices."
-Construction vendor, 11 to 25 employees
What actually closes the gap
The fix isn't a better accounting platform. Most vendors already have a perfectly good one, and swapping it out wouldn't touch the actual problem. What's missing is something built specifically for the part accounting software was never meant to cover, and it would need to do three things a general ledger doesn't.
Track compliance documents against every client's requirements at once. Not a spreadsheet a vendor maintains by hand, but a system that knows which COI expires when, for which job, and flags it before it lapses instead of after a client notices.
Cut down on how many separate logins and formats a vendor has to manage. Every portal with its own username, password, and upload format is one more place the same information has to be re-entered. A real fix reduces that number instead of adding to it.
Sit alongside the accounting software already in place, not replace it. The gap was never in the books. It was in everything that happens around them, so the fix doesn't need to touch what's already working.
A tool that did those three things wouldn't be one more platform stacked on top of the others vendors are already running. It would be the first one built to actually close the gap between them.
This finding comes from our 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report, a survey of 417 vendors on how they handle payments, portals, and compliance. The report recap, 2026 Vendor Payment Report: What 400+ Vendors Told Us About Getting Paid, discussed several more findings in the same vein.