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Vendors

Your vendor directory is the single record for every company or person you buy from. Each vendor holds contact details, a category, a status, an optional credit limit, tax ID, and default payment term — and is shared across bills, vendor credits, purchase orders, vendor contracts, and inventory. Because so much of accounts payable references the vendor, keeping the list clean and de-duplicated is what keeps AP reporting and approval routing accurate.

Key capabilities

  • Vendor records with fuzzy name search and pagination
  • Duplicate detection by name similarity, email, and tax ID before you create
  • Email uniqueness enforced on create (a second vendor with the same email is rejected)
  • Status tracking — active, inactive, or blocked
  • Credit limits shown in dollars
  • Category, tax ID (EIN/VAT), website, address, phone, and free-text notes
  • Default payment term applied to new bills for that vendor
  • Multiple contacts per vendor with roles and a primary flag (add, edit, delete inline)
  • Bulk CSV upload with a downloadable template, per-row validation, and duplicate skipping
  • Deletion that preserves the vendor on existing bills and invoices
  • Cross-business counterparty registry linkage for firm-wide analytics
  • Inventory fields: default ship-from location and average lead time for reorder sizing

How it works

Creating a vendor checks for duplicates, links it to the global counterparty registry, and makes it available everywhere AP references vendors.

flowchart TD
  new["New Vendor / CSV row"] --> dup{"Duplicate check"}
  dup -->|"email already exists"| reject["Rejected / skipped"]
  dup -->|"unique"| create["Create vendor"]
  create --> registry["Link to counterparty registry"]
  registry --> use["Used by bills, POs, contracts, credits"]

How to use it

  1. Open Vendors under the Contacts sidebar group (/books/vendors).
  2. Click New Vendor and enter at least a name and email; add phone, address, tax ID, website, category, and notes as needed.
  3. As you type, DayZero surfaces potential duplicates by name, email, and tax ID — review them before saving.
  4. Set a status (Active, Inactive, Blocked) and an optional credit limit and default payment term.
  5. Open a vendor to manage its contacts — add people with roles (e.g. Sales, Accounting) and mark one primary.
  6. To import many at once, use Bulk upload: download the CSV template, fill it in, and upload (duplicate emails are skipped).

Pro tips

  • Email is the duplicate key on create — a vendor whose email matches an existing one is rejected outright, so use the duplicate checker (which also compares name and tax ID) before forcing a new record.
  • Deleting a vendor is non-destructive: it disappears from pickers but stays attached to historical bills and invoices, so your past reports never break.
  • A vendor can only be cleanly removed when it has no bills or orders — otherwise keep it and set status to inactive or blocked.
  • Set a default payment term per vendor so new bills inherit the right due date instead of you setting it every time.
  • Categories power year-end spend analysis — assign them consistently (e.g. Raw Materials, Services) from day one.
  • Bulk uploads cap at 1,000 rows and require name and email columns; bad rows are reported individually rather than failing the whole file.

In-depth guide

Status & capability properties

Derived flags that gate what you can do with a vendor:

  • is_active — requires both not-deleted and status active.
  • is_blocked / is_inactive — reflect the status field.
  • can_be_deleted — true only when the vendor has no bills and no inventory orders.
  • can_receive_orders — mirrors is_active.

Contacts

Each vendor can have many contacts (name, email, phone, role, primary flag, notes), managed separately from the vendor record. Contacts are separate from the vendor's own email and are useful for routing remittance, POs, or disputes to the right person.

Duplicate detection

How DayZero guards against duplicate vendors:

  • Pre-create check — the counterparty enrichment service compares the proposed name (similarity), email, and tax ID against existing vendors and returns a match list with a similarity score and match type.
  • Create path — additionally hard-blocks an exact email collision.
  • Bulk upload — skips any row whose email already exists (in the file or the database) instead of erroring.

Counterparty registry

New vendors are linked to a global counterparty registry (auto-created if needed); if linkage can't complete, vendor creation still succeeds. The registry enables cross-business analytics for advisory firms.

Related features & AP approval

Vendors are the anchor for the whole AP path:

  • Bills — reference a vendor.
  • Vendor Contracts — attach to a vendor and drive the contract-match signal.
  • Vendor Credits — reduce what a vendor is owed.
  • Purchase orders / inventory — share the same vendor record.
  • AP approval — the workflow needs the bill's vendor to find an active contract and compute the routing signal — see AP Approval Workflow and Vendor Contracts.

Edge cases

  • A bill can briefly exist without a vendor, but it won't contract-match or route through approval until one is set.
  • Changing a vendor's status to blocked does not retroactively change existing bills — it only affects new selection/order eligibility.
  • Deleted vendors are excluded from search and pickers but remain available for historical reporting.

Start free and keep your vendor list clean from day one.