Merchants and merchant groups

Setting up merchants is optional. One advantage is for tax reporting purposes. When adding a merchant, you can specify the tax ID number for the merchant and the income code. By assigning income codes to active merchants, you can track 1099 reportable income for any purchases you create.

For information about income codes and 1099 reporting, see the Payables User Guide.

Merchants can be the same as a Payables vendor, or they can be different. For example, a corporate office can be set up as a vendor, but the individual retail stores reporting to corporate can be set up as merchants. You can associate a merchant with a Payables vendor using Procurement Card Merchant Cross Reference. You can track the total amount that you spent for the vendor, without adding up the totals from several retail stores that belong to the same corporation.

Merchants can be gathered together into a merchant group. When reviewing cardholder requests, administrators decide whether to include or exclude merchants in the merchant group from the procurement card transactions. If merchants are included, then only the merchants that belong to the merchant group are valid for that card. If merchants are excluded, then only merchants that are not in the merchant group are valid for that card.

Merchant groups belong to a program, and are set up either by merchant name, or by merchant category code.

You cannot delete a merchant if it is assigned to a merchant group.