Options for vendor group setup

A vendor group is the set of vendors you do business with. Vendor groups let more than one company make purchases from and payments to the same vendors. A company can access only one vendor group.

Before defining your vendor group structure in the application, you will want to select the structure that will work best for your organization. Consider the reporting options you need and the number of vendor records you want to store and maintain. You can structure your vendor groups 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 (a combination of the first two options).

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

Shared vendor group advantages

When you define one shared vendor group for all companies, you realize these benefits:

You are required to create and maintain only one vendor record for each vendor, minimizing data entry and improving data integrity.
You can view vendor balances by company or by vendor group.
You can generate one consolidated vendor list.
You can take advantage of pay groups, which allow you to consolidate payments from multiple companies and send a single payment to a vendor.
You can produce just one 1099 for each vendor.
You can still set defaults at the company level; the defaults do not need to be the same for all companies 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.

Separate vendor group advantages

When you define separate vendor groups for each company, you realize these benefits:

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.