Vendors Overview
The Vendors module allows you to organize items based on purchasing information, and automates order creation by tracking specific criteria for orders and deliveries for each vendor contract. For each Vendor created in Gaia you can track and pull reports on product lists, usage and spend by site, and manage order guides for different groups.
General Information
System ID: Unique ID generate by Gaia, cannot be changed.
District ID: User defined ID, for example the vendor code in accounting systems.
Approved Spend: The total budget a district agrees to spend with a vendor over a specific period. This amount is across all sites in the district.
Minimum Order Value: You can define a minimum total value for an order to show warnings when an order does not meet this total, however it doesn't block any user actions. More details can be found in the Orders article.
Contact Details: Different types of contacts can be added such as billing contact, delivery contact, sales contact, in order to easily track email, phone numbers, and addresses.
Deliveries
You can set up multiple deliveries for each vendor based on the agreed delivery schedule in your contract. For each delivery window, you need to specify the first instance and Gaia will auto-calculate all subsequent deliveries. The following information is needed to successfully manage deliveries
Lead time (Order by day):
Delivery date (Receive by day):
Frequency
Schools
Product List
For each vendor you can access the full list of items that are procured from that vendor, organized by item category. This can be specified from the item page as described in teh Product section below. An item may appear as a product on one or more vendor.
Order Guides
Multiple order guides can be created for a vendor to control what products each site or group of sites can see and add to their shopping lists. Only items active on a schools' order guides will show up on their pantry and search results. A school may have more than one Order guide for the same vendor, for example K-5 order guide + special diets order guide.
Each order guide needs a name, a timeframe, and applicable sites to be provided.
Orders
For each vendor, you can quickly view orders by site, status, date, and more. This is in addition to any custom reports you want to create across multiple vendors.
Products Overview
A product is a specific instance of a pantry item tied to one vendor. An item may have one or more vendor products, for example various cases sizes from the same vendor, or the same case size from multiple vendors.
Packaging Unit: Specifies how the item is packaged (e.g., "Case of 72" or "Box of 4kg").
Capacity: Indicates the quantity or weight of the packaging.
Item: Identifies the pantry item (e.g., cereal bar or apples).
Adding products to an item
Products can be added from the Create Vendor Product dialog box on the Item page. Options to add multiple products at a time directly from the vendor page are planned on the roadmap.
Managing Pricing
Users can modify the product price, and Gaia keeps the full history of pricing changes by date. This also impacts inventory valuation, as Gaia automatically assigns the estimated inventory value based on the product price at the time of placing the order.
Updating the product price may have downstream impacts.
May impact:
Meal Cost: Recipes containing the product will adjust in cost, potentially impacting compliance with cost criteria if the meal hasn’t been served yet.
Pending Orders: Product prices on unplaced orders can change dynamically until the order is finalized.
Will not change:
Past menus or purchase requests (PRs).
Existing inventory.
Placed orders.