How to add a supplier and record their terms

A supplier is the company you actually pay. Store › Suppliers lists every one, with their brands, lead time, payment terms, currency, minimum order and how many purchase orders are still open with them. Start at What are suppliers and purchase orders? for how this fits together.

Before you start

Adding and editing suppliers needs the supplier edit permission, which is its own dial rather than general store write access. Without it the page reads and the buttons are absent.

How do you add one?

Add supplier, which asks for a name and a currency and nothing else. Fill in the rest on the supplier's own page when you have it.

That is deliberate. The moment you need a supplier is usually the moment you are writing an order, and stopping to collect an address helps nobody.

You can also create one without leaving the order form: type a name the vendor picker does not recognise and choose the Create … row. See How to write a purchase order.

Names have to be unique, ignoring case and surrounding spaces. Adding a duplicate tells you which record already owns the name, and offers to restore it instead when the clash is with an archived supplier.

What should you fill in, and why?

On the supplier's page: rep name, email, phone, website, address, notes, currency, payment terms, lead time, revision window and minimum order.

Three of those change what the rest of Tideswell does, so they are worth doing properly.

• Lead time drives the suggested reorder quantities on the stock screen and how urgently an item gets flagged as low. A supplier who genuinely takes ninety days will be under-ordered every week until this is recorded. See How to find out what you need to reorder.
• Revision window is how many days before shipping they need your final changes, and it makes the revise-by date on an order fill itself in.
• Currency is copied onto each new order at the moment it is created, and never re-resolved afterwards.

Minimum order is recorded for reference. Nothing stops you writing an order below it, so treat it as a note to yourself rather than a control.

How do you link Shopify brand names to a supplier?

At the top of the suppliers list there is an Unmatched brands tray, listing brand names found on your Shopify products that are not tied to a supplier yet.

For each one you can Attach to… an existing supplier, Create supplier straight from the brand name, or Ignore a brand you never want to be asked about again.

Doing this is what makes a purchase order typed with that brand name resolve to the right supplier automatically. It is five minutes that saves a great deal of tidying later.

The tray disappears entirely when nothing is unmatched rather than sitting there as an empty box. Attaching and detaching brands is done from the list, not from a supplier's own page.

What is on a supplier's page?

Their terms card showing what is in effect today, their full purchase order history with a total per currency, their delivery record, and their brand chips.

You can also comment on a supplier and record a decision about why they are set up the way they are, which is where "we moved to them because the last mill kept missing dates" should live. See What are decisions and track records?.

How do you stop buying from one?

Archive them. They stay attached to every past purchase order and only disappear from the pickers you use when writing new ones.

Turn on Show archived to see them again, and restore one from there.

Archiving is not deleting, which matters: an order from three years ago still shows who it was placed with.

What if you buy one brand through another company?

Use Bought through another supplier to fold one supplier into another. Its purchase orders and brand names move across and it is archived.

Before you confirm, a panel explains in plain English what happens, what you gain, what you give up, and that it can be undone. Read it: the folded supplier stops having its own lead time, contact, terms and currency, and the surviving supplier's are used instead, including in the reorder maths.

Undo merge on the archived supplier's page reverses it, moving every order back. It refuses outright rather than half-undoing if any of those orders has since been reassigned by hand.