Summary: As a business owner, inventory and non-inventory items are essential organs in the anatomy of your business: products with which to perform services or goods to sell retail. Or maybe you have overhead expenses like office supplies. And all of these purchases require interactions with different vendors. The process of acquiring and managing several suppliers with different points of contact can add complexity to the management of your business.
This article will explain how easy it is to add and save all your Vendor information in ServiceBox, send all your purchase orders from one place, and move this information over to your accounting software.
How to activate this feature?
To activate this feature go to Settings> Features> Check off 'Purchasing (Vendor Orders)' and click the Save button in the bottom.
How to add a Vendor?
Click the "New" button in the top menu bar and click "Vendor."
The "Add Vendor" screen (see below) will open up and is very intuitive. It contains the following fields:
1. Location: If you have the Multi-Location feature activated in ServiceBox the "Location" field will be at the top of the "Add Vendors" section. This will allow users to add specific Locations and filter the list of Vendors based on Location.
For users who would like to know more about how Multi-Location works, please click here: https://support.jobboxsoft.com/en/support/solutions/articles/19000137932-multi-location-enhancement-activation-and-management-advanced-functionality
2. Name: This is a mandatory field. Users must enter the Vendor name before clicking Save.
Please note the Vendor name should be unique within the system. For example, if you have a customer name saved as 'Bob Smith' the system won't allow you to save the Vendor name 'Bob Smith'. This is intentional to avoid errors during the accounting sync.
3. Address: Enter the Vendor address in this field. ServiceBox uses Google Maps as our web mapping platform so if the address is in google maps it will pre-populate the Address, City, State and Postal Code.
If the address is not found by google maps then the user enters it manually.
4. Email: The Email field is a single text box which only accepts email addresses. The email address saved here will automatically pre-populate on the Vendor Order email form.
If you would like to save more then one email address use a comma (,) to separate them.
5. Phone: No surprises here, the "Phone" field allows you to enter a phone number. It's recommended to save the phone number in a format that separates the area code with parentheses ( ) or by using dashes.
6. Fax: Here you can enter the number for your Vendor's fax machine, if one exists.
7. Active: If this box is checked it indicates that this is an "Active Vendor"...one your company is currently doing business with or has done business with recently. If the box is left unchecked the system will list the Vendor as an 'Inactive Vendor'...one that your company has not done business with for a while. If you choose to do business with the vendor in the future you may change it back to "Active."
The last step is to click the green 'Save' button at the bottom.
This will open the Vendor detail screen for you, where you may see the contact information of the Vendor and all the Vendor Orders listed under their name. The Notes, To Dos and Attachments saved under this Vendor name can all be found here in one place.
How to find a Vendor in ServiceBox?
You may search for a Vendor via Global search or Local search in ServiceBox.
Global Search: Type the Vendor name in the search bar appearing in the top right corner. This search will pull up results for the keywords entered from the entire system.
Local Search: If you click on the Vendor menu appearing on the left corner of the screen, you can type in the Vendor name in the search field and it will filter the search exclusively from the Vendor list.
How to delete a Vendor in ServiceBox?
If a Vendor doesn't have a Vendor Order within ServiceBox, and won't anytime soon, the user has the option to delete that Vendor's record by clicking on the delete button appearing in the bottom right corner of the Vendor detail screen.
However if you do have a Vendor Order linked to a Vendor, our system won't allow you to delete the Vendor. See what we did for you there? :) Instead, it will automatically mark the Vendor as Inactive in the system.
