This article explains how to set up and manage vendors, delivery windows, and order guides in Gaia. These three components work together to power the ordering workflow — each item on your menu must be linked to a vendor product, each vendor must have delivery windows configured, and order guides control which products each school can order.

Before schools can place orders, three things need to be in place:

• Every menu item must be linked to a vendor product (so Gaia knows where it's purchased and how it's packaged).

• Every vendor must have delivery windows set up (so Gaia knows when deliveries arrive and can generate orders on the right schedule).

• Order guides must be configured to control which products each school is allowed to order.

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.

A vendor in Gaia represents a supplier sties purchase food or supplies from — such as a produce distributor, a dairy company, or your own warehouse. Each vendor record stores purchasing information, product listings, delivery schedules, and pricing history.

Navigate to the Vendors section from your main menu. Selecting a vendor opens its profile, where you can see:

Each item on your menu must be associated with a vendor product. A vendor product tells Gaia:

To link a menu item to a vendor product, open the item in the Pantry and add the appropriate vendor product.

Delivery windows tell Gaia when a vendor delivers to your schools. This is required for the ordering system to work correctly — without delivery windows, Gaia cannot determine which delivery an order belongs to or generate orders on the right schedule.

When a school places an order (using Shop Week), Gaia looks at the delivery windows to determine:

By default, a delivery covers the rest of the current week from the day after it arrives. When you shop the following week, Gaia updates the orders accordingly, taking into account what was already ordered or received previously.

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

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 the Product section below. An item may appear as a product on one or more vendor.

An order guide is a list of products that a specific school (or group of schools) is allowed to order from a given vendor. Order guides give you fine-grained control over purchasing — you can enable or disable individual products for specific schools, or create separate order guides for schools with different needs.

By default, all products in a vendor's catalog are available to all schools. If all your schools order the same items from a vendor, no special configuration is needed beyond ensuring the vendor's products are all toggled on.

You may want to create a separate order guide when a specific school needs access to products that other schools should not see — for example, a lactose-free milk that only one site orders.

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.

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.

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.