Vendors

Contractors and suppliers as first-class records - assignments, site coverage, performance history, and the paper trail.

A vendor record is where an outside company's relationship with your organization accumulates: contact details, which sites they cover, the work they've been assigned, and how it went.

Vendor records

• Identity & contacts - company, contacts, phone/email, trade/service type
• Site assignments - which sites the vendor serves; multi-site organizations use this to keep regional contractors scoped to their region
• Network assignments - which infrastructure networks the vendor works on, for organizations running linear assets

Quality tracking and paperwork live on the contract, not the vendor: each contract carries a 1-10 quality score, and documents (insurance certificates, WSIB clearance, the signed agreement) attach to the contract record. The vendor page is the index that pulls those together.

Vendors support CSV import and export from the vendors page - load an existing contractor list in one pass instead of retyping it.

Vendors in the work loop

• Work orders can be assigned to a vendor rather than a staff member - contracted work sits in the same queue with the same statuses, so nothing lives in an email thread.
• Secure work order links hand the vendor exactly one job's details without an account.
• Completion still captures costs - the invoice amount posts to the work order, so contractor spend lands in asset history like in-house labour does.
• Parts reference their supplier, so "who do we buy these from?" has one answer.

Contracts and vendors

Ongoing service agreements - snow clearing, elevator maintenance, HVAC service - link the vendor to a contract record carrying the term, value, covered sites, and renewal date. The vendor page shows their active contracts; the contract page shows the vendor. Between the two, procurement questions ("when does this expire? what did we pay last term?") stop requiring an archaeology dig.

Practical patterns

1. One vendor record per company, not per contact - contacts change, the relationship doesn't.
2. Rate the work while it's fresh. A one-line note on a completed work order ("late twice, quality fine") is what makes next year's tender evaluation honest.
3. Watch vendor spend on the dashboard - cost by vendor over time surfaces both creep and concentration risk.