Suppliers and purchase orders

Two pages in your account sit upstream of everything else: Suppliers, the directory of every company you buy from, and Purchase Orders, the record of every restock you raise. The supplier record lets you answer "who made this, and were they checked" with a document, and the purchase order is the moment an item gets its identity, before the goods exist.

The directory

Open Suppliers from the main menu. You get a searchable list (name, country, lead time) with a count above it, and a panel that slides in from the right when you click a row or Add supplier. Only the name is required to create one. Save it, reopen it, and fill in the rest when you have it; the certifications section and the products and pricing section only appear after the record has been saved for the first time. At the bottom, Save changes keeps your edits and Cancel drops them. Delete is for a supplier added by mistake. For one you have stopped using, untick Active instead, which archives the record and keeps its history.

The first three sections are plain: contact email and phone, postal address and country, and your commercial terms. Lead time in days is the one that matters most, because the reorder engine uses it to decide when a new order has to be placed so that stock arrives before you run out. Payment terms, default currency and minimum order value go alongside it.

The regulatory section

The small grey codes next to each label are references for support and can be ignored. The legal entity identifier is a twenty-character code that names one company anywhere in the world, issued through the GLEIF system; ask the supplier for theirs or search the public GLEIF database, and leave it blank if they have none. Factory latitude and longitude are only needed if the supplier deals in one of the seven commodities covered by the EU deforestation rule (cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood) or in anything made from them. Tick the ones that apply; if none do, the supplier is outside that rule and the coordinates stay empty. Code of conduct signed at records the date the supplier agreed to your standards on workers, ethics and the environment.

Next Horizon sets two fields, the sanctions screening status and the due diligence score, because an auditor gives no weight to a score the supplier's customer could set. A supplier that has not passed screening can be blocked from being ordered from, so a reorder suggestion for them shows as blocked instead of going through.

Certifications, products and pricing

Record each certificate the supplier holds, the type from the list or named under other, the dates it was issued and runs to, and a link to the document itself. Each one reads pending review until the underlying document has been checked, when it gets a verified badge. Under products and pricing, link the products this supplier sells you, with their cost and the minimum order quantity. That link gives the account the source and price of each item, and a reorder suggestion uses it to pick a supplier when you have not named one.

A supplier record you can show an auditor has the certificate linked to it.

New purchase orders

Open Purchase Orders and click New purchase order. The header asks for the supplier, chosen from the directory, the currency, which comes from the supplier's record on its own, the facility the goods ship to, the Incoterm that says who pays and who carries the risk at each stage, the issue date, the date the supplier promises the goods will leave the factory, which is not the date they reach you, and a default country of manufacture that pre-fills each line. Every order gets a reference number; tick the override only if you want to type your own.

Then the lines, one per product: quantity, country of manufacture, HS code and the kind of barcode or label the goods carry. Create draft saves it. From draft the order can be sent to the supplier or cancelled, and that is the whole life of a line, because once an order exists its lines cannot be edited. To change the lines, cancel it and raise a new one. Check the lines before you create the draft.

Stock on order and item identity

Stock on order stops the reorder engine suggesting the same purchase twice: a suggestion is always the gap between the level you should hold and the stock on the shelf plus the stock already on its way. And the purchase order is where an item's identity is allocated, against the units the factory will make, so that the weight, dimensions and contents a label will later need are set here rather than guessed at the packing bench. The freight booking and the passport both write to that record.