Suppliers is your address book of the businesses you buy from — who to ring, what the terms are, how long they take. It is a reference list. Nothing here places an order.
Add a supplier
Press Add Supplier. Two fields are required:
- Supplier Name
- Phone
Everything else is optional: Contact Person, Email, an address, Payment Terms (free text — Net 30), Lead Time (days), Tax ID / EIN, Preferred supplier, and Notes.
Two things about the address to save you confusion later. It is stored as a single line, so Street, City, State and ZIP are joined together when you save and all come back in the Street box when you reopen the record. And Contact Person is split on the first space into a first and last name, so Mary Anne Boyd comes back as first name Mary, last name Anne Boyd.
Preferred supplier is a note to yourself. Nothing in the app reads it.
Edit and archive
The eye icon opens a read-only detail panel; the pencil opens the edit form, which re-reads the full record first so nothing you cannot see gets overwritten.
The box icon archives the supplier. There is no confirmation — one click and it is gone from the list. The record is kept in the database, but the app has no screen that lists archived suppliers and no button that brings one back, so treat it as final.
The All / Active / Inactive filter chips are on the page, but the list only ever contains active suppliers, so Inactive always comes back empty.
Figures not to trust
At the top of the page:
- Total Suppliers and Active are counted from your list and are correct.
- Pending Orders always reads 0, and Avg Lead Time always reads 5.2d. Neither is calculated from your data. They are placeholders. Ignore them.
The same applies inside a supplier's detail panel. The three tiles across the middle of it — Avg Lead Time, Total Ordered and On-Time Rate — read 0 days, $0.00 and 0% for every supplier, whatever you have bought. Products Supplied and Purchase Order History below them are always empty there too.
Avg Lead Time is the one that catches people out: it is not the Lead Time (days) you typed on the form. Enter a supplier with a 14-day lead time, open the detail panel, and the tile still says 0 days. Your figure is stored and is there when you open the pencil to edit — the tile simply does not read it.
The Products column in the list is real — it counts the distinct products that have appeared on a purchase order with that supplier. If you have not raised purchase orders in this system it will be 0 for everyone, and that is accurate.
What this list cannot do for you
There is nowhere to say this product comes from this supplier. The product form has no supplier field and the supplier record has no product picker.
You choose a supplier on each line of Generate purchase orders, so a permanent supplier field on the product is not required to create a draft. Select the right vendor before generating and review the resulting drafts. See See what to reorder.