How do I create a Vendor?

A decorating shop buys from two very different kinds of supplier, and most systems only model one of them properly.

There are blanks distributors — SanMar, S&S Activewear, alphabroder — where you are ordering garments against a job. And there are contract decorators, the shops you send work to when it is a process you do not run in-house, or when you are simply full. Both are vendors. They behave nothing alike.

Blanks suppliers: the problem is timing

The thing that goes wrong with blanks is rarely price. It is a colour going out of stock between quoting and ordering, or a case arriving two short, or a backorder nobody flagged until the press was already scheduled.

What is worth tracking per supplier:

• Typical lead time from your actual experience, not their published figure. If a supplier says two days and delivers in four, plan on four.
• Which warehouse serves you and its cutoff time. The same supplier can be next-day or four-day depending on which distribution centre the stock ships from.
• Your negotiated pricing tier. Quoting from list price when you buy at a tier below it loses jobs you should have won.
• What actually arrived. Received short is the single most common cause of a missed ship date, and it is only visible if receiving is recorded against the purchase order.

Contract decorators: the problem is accountability

Outsourced work is where jobs get lost, because it leaves your building and your system at the same time. The customer still holds you responsible for a deadline you no longer control.

Keep outsourced work on the order it belongs to, with its own due date — earlier than the customer's, so there is room to recover. A job sent out on Tuesday and due back Friday for a Monday ship date has a weekend of slack. The same job due back Monday has none.

Set suppliers up once, not per order

Add each vendor once with their contact details, terms and lead time, and they become selectable when raising a purchase order. The point is not the record itself — it is that a PO raised against a known vendor inherits everything you already know about them, instead of someone retyping an address and guessing at a lead time.

It also means your purchasing history is queryable. Which supplier is actually cheapest for a given garment across the last year is a question you can only answer if the POs are structured data rather than emails.

What to do first

Add the three or four suppliers you actually use. Most shops discover that despite having accounts with a dozen distributors, the great majority of their volume goes to a handful — those are the ones worth setting up properly. Add the rest when a job needs them.

Related: creating purchase orders · purchasing and receiving.