Vendor groups

A vendor group is the set of vendors with which a company does business. Vendor groups are used so that more than one company can make purchases from and payments to the same vendors. A company can access only one vendor group.

Before you define the vendor group structure, select the structure that works best for the organization. Consider the reporting options that are required and the number of vendor records that the company wants to store and maintain. Vendor groups can be structured in one of three ways:

• Define one shared vendor group for all companies.
• Define a separate vendor group for each company.
• Define a shared vendor group for selected companies and separate vendor groups for others. This is a combination of the first two options.

  For each vendor group, associate only one item group and one procurement group.

These are the benefits when you define one shared vendor group for all companies:

• You create and maintain only one vendor record for each vendor, which minimizes data entry and improves data integrity.
• You can view vendor balances by company or by vendor group.
• You can generate one consolidated vendor list.
• You can create one contract and control pricing by the Tier and Member level.
• You can take advantage of pay groups, so that you can consolidate payments from multiple companies and send a single payment to a vendor.
• You can produce only one 1099 for each vendor.
• You can still set defaults at the company level. The defaults are not required to be the same for all companies that are sharing the vendor group. For example, you can assign a unique cash code or invoice accrual code to each company that shares a vendor group.

These are the benefits when you define separate vendor groups for each company:

• There are fewer vendors in each vendor group, which can simplify searching, inquiring, and reporting.
• Each company can retain control over its own vendor records.