Vendors & Contacts

A vendor is a supplier or business you buy from. The vendor record is the anchor point for everything purchasing-related: purchase orders, vendor invoices, vendor returns, and the Products you source from that supplier all link back here. Keeping vendors tidy means your buying history, outstanding AP, and reorder suggestions are always one click away.

A vendor record does not create a user account. Contacts under a vendor are a separate address book — people you communicate with, not people who log in.

Creating a vendor #

New vendors are created from Inventory → Vendors → New Vendor. The form is intentionally short:

• Name — the company or individual name. Required.
• Email — primary contact email address; used for correspondence and searchable across the vendor list.
• Phone — main phone number.
• Website — URL, validated as a proper web address.
• Notes — free-form internal notes about the relationship, payment terms, lead time quirks, or anything else the team should know.
• Custom fields — any extra attributes defined for the Vendor resource by your account's custom fields configuration.

The vendor list #

The vendor list (Inventory → Vendors) shows each vendor's name, email, phone, and website, sorted alphabetically by name. Search filters match on both name and email. Use the Trashed filter to show or restore soft-deleted vendors — deleting a vendor preserves all its associated purchase orders, invoices, and contacts.

From anywhere in the app, the global search box also finds a vendor by name, email, or phone — and brings back that vendor's purchase orders, bills, and returns with it. See Finding Records.

What lives on the vendor page #

Open a vendor to find its details plus tabs for everything linked to it:

• Contacts — the people at this supplier (see Vendor Contacts below).
• Products — the inventory Products this vendor supplies, with catalog pricing and lead times (see Product Links below).
• Purchase Orders — every PO raised against this vendor, with PO number, status, order date, and total.
• Invoices — vendor (AP) invoices linked to this vendor. See Vendor Invoices & Payments.
• Returns — returns sent back to this vendor. See Vendor Returns.
• Change history — a full audit trail of edits to the vendor record and its contacts.

Vendor Contacts #

A vendor can have any number of contacts — the individual people (account managers, sales reps, billing contacts) at that supplier. Contacts are managed from the Contacts tab on the vendor's page.

Each contact carries:

• Name — required.
• Title — job title or role, e.g. Account Manager or Sales Rep.
• Email — direct email for this person.
• Phone — direct phone number.
• Notes — free-form notes about the individual.

Contacts are scoped to their vendor and are soft-deleted independently — removing a contact does not touch the parent vendor or any transactions.

Product Links and Catalog Pricing #

The Products tab connects a vendor to the specific Products you purchase from them. Each Product link (also called a Vendor SKU) stores the information purchasing and reorder suggestions need to put together a purchase order:

• Product — which of your catalog Products this entry refers to.
• Vendor SKU # — the supplier's own part number or catalog number for the Product.
• Catalog Price — what the vendor charges per unit, stored in cents internally (the UI shows dollars). This becomes the default unit cost on new PO lines for this Product.
• Lead Time (days) — how many days between placing an order and receiving stock. Used by reorder suggestion calculations.
• Min Order Qty — the smallest quantity the vendor will accept on a single order line.
• Pack Size / Order Unit — how many base units come in one ordered pack (e.g. 10 with order unit box) and what that pack is called.
• Preferred — toggle one link as the preferred vendor for a Product. The preferred vendor is surfaced first when creating purchase orders and in reorder suggestions.
• Notes — supplier-specific purchasing notes.

A Product can be linked to multiple vendors, which is useful when you have backup suppliers. The same Product link can also be created from the Vendors tab on the Product itself — the two views are mirrors of each other.

How vendors connect to other modules #

• Purchase orders — every PO is addressed to a vendor; the vendor's Product links provide the default unit cost and pack size when you add lines. See Purchase Orders.
• Vendor invoices — AP invoices are associated with a vendor and can be matched to one or more POs. See Vendor Invoices & Payments.
• Vendor returns — units sent back to a supplier are recorded against the vendor. See Vendor Returns.
• Reorder suggestions — the reorder engine uses lead times and catalog prices from Product links to size and prioritize replenishment orders. See Reorder Suggestions.

Doing it from the API #

# List vendors (search by name or email)
curl "https://your-domain.com/api/v1/vendors?search=acme" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

# Create a vendor
curl -X POST "https://your-domain.com/api/v1/vendors" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme Supply Co.", "email": "orders@acme.example", "phone": "555-0100"}'

# Add a contact to a vendor
curl -X POST "https://your-domain.com/api/v1/vendor-contacts" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"vendor_id": "<vendor-id>", "name": "Jane Smith", "title": "Account Manager", "email": "jane@acme.example"}'

The vendor_id field on contact requests takes the vendor's id. Listing contacts also accepts a vendor_id query parameter to scope results to a single vendor: GET /api/v1/vendor-contacts?vendor_id=<id>.