Suppliers are essential partners in your inventory management workflow, representing the vendors from whom you purchase products to stock your inventory. Supplier records store all the critical information you need to streamline your purchasing process, from contact details, payment terms, delivery preferences to transaction history.

This comprehensive guide walks you through creating and managing supplier records, including setting up contact information and configuring purchase settings for efficient order tracking. Whether you're adding your first supplier or optimizing existing relationships, you'll learn how to maintain accurate supplier data that integrates seamlessly with your purchasing workflows and helps calculate precise Average Landed Costs for your inventory valuation.

Manage which of your users can create and manage suppliers by enabling the following role permissions:

Create new suppliers from the View Suppliers page, via the Import Suppliers template, or from your account's main menu.

To create a supplier:

After a supplier's record has been created, you'll see up to two functional buttons in the top right corner of their page:

The table below outlines the fields available in a supplier record's Details tab and how they can be updated. Not all fields are required, but most can be updated at any time to align with your supplier's changes.

A supplier's Address tab allows you to store a supplier's main Postal and Physical addresses:

Use the following fields, listed beneath the Postal Address and Physical Address headers, to provide their address details:

If the Physical Address is the same as the supplier's Postal Address, click on the "Copy from postal address" link at the top of the Physical Address section, and the Postal Address will copy across.

The Contacts tab in a supplier's record allows you to record all the people or teams you may need to contact during the purchasing process. Contacts saved with valid email addresses in your supplier records can be configured to appropriately auto-populate the recipients of emails generated for their Purchase Orders, helping you automate and streamline updates to the sent.

To add a contact to a supplier:

Alongside the contact's First Name, Last Name, and Email, you can provide the additional details described in the table below, either when adding the contact or by clicking on the Contact tab's grid.

The first contact added to a supplier's record will automatically be labelled the "Primary" contact. The primary contact will always be listed at the top of the supplier's Contacts list and will show a green tick icon on the contact's row, in the Primary column. The primary contact is the default contact that will be used for the supplier. Only one contact can be a supplier's primary, but it can be reassigned at any time.

To update a contact to the primary contact:

When integrated with Xero, the supplier's primary contact MUST have an email address to sync successfully. Up to 5 contacts in your supplier record will sync as contact persons in Xero when the configuration setting "Export supplier contacts" is enabled. When integrated with QuickBooks, only the primary contact will sync.

When a contact's details are no longer needed for a customer, delete them from your customer's Contacts tab:

A primary contact cannot be deleted, you must assign a new primary contact for the supplier before deleting.

In the Default CC Email Address field, underneath the list of contacts in the supplier's Contacts tab, you can enter the email addresses of any recipients you want automatically included in Cc for emails generated for the supplier in your account. Separate multiple email addresses with commas.

The Purchases tab in a supplier's record provides an overview of the Purchase Orders that have been created for the customer. By default, the tab displays Purchase Orders with an open status, where "open" includes Parked, custom Purchase Order status, Placed, and Receipted statuses.

Use the Status drop-down menu to filter by:

From the supplier's Purchases tab, you can perform bulk or individual actions to update the Purchase Orders.

Hover over the action cog icon in the Purchase Order's row to select one of the following actions, for the specific Purchase Order:

Tick the checkbox in the Purchases tab's grid to select multiple Purchase Orders and hover over the action cog icon in the grid's header to select one of the following actions:

The Returns tab in a supplier's record provides an overview of the Supplier Returns that have been created for the supplier. Use the Return Status filter available at the top of the Returns tab to filter by the following statuses:

Hover over the action cog icon in the Supplier Returns row to select one of the following actions:

The Costings tab in a supplier's record provides an overview of the Purchase Orders where the supplier has been added as a Cost Line. Use the Order Status filter available at the top of the Costings tab to filter by the following statuses:

Hover over the action cog icon in the Purchase Orders row to select one of the following actions:

Upload and attach external documents to your supplier records via the Attachments tab. The files available in the supplier's record will then be stored in your File Library and available to attach to the emails sent for their transactions. Use the grey upload space at the top of the Attachments tab to either upload local files or allocate files from your File Library to your product.