What is a supplier?

A supplier is an organization from which you purchase goods and services. Suppliers are used throughout SunSystems. In SunSystems Order Fulfilment, purchase orders and invoices can be entered for suppliers. In Financials, suppliers are used indirectly because they are linked to an associated creditor/payables or client account.

There is a large amount of information that can be maintained for each supplier, some of which is only required if you are using Order Fulfilment. In addition to the predefined details, a supplier may have up to ten analysis codes. You can use these analysis codes to maintain other useful information. For example, you might establish analysis dimension to record product group code to enable you to identify the type of products supplied by the supplier. A creditor/payables account may also have up to ten analysis codes and these may be totally different to the ten supplier analysis codes.

All of the details relating to a supplier are defined in Supplier (SUS).

Linking a Supplier to a Ledger Account

A supplier is linked to a single creditor/payables account or a client account in the Financials ledger. This account holds all of the financial postings for the supplier. When you add a new supplier you can create the associated creditor/payables account at the same time by entering all of the chart of account details.

A supplier must have an account before it can trade. To do this it must have either its own account, or be linked to another supplier who does have an account using the Remittance Supplier Code. This allows more than one supplier to be linked to the same creditor/payables account. It is used for a multi-site supplier, where the supplier has a number of locations or sites, only one of which is the central point to which remittances are sent.

One-Off Suppliers

You do not need to create a separate supplier record for every organization you deal with. For example, you may make a single purchase from an organization you are unlikely to deal with again.

Instead, you can define a single one-off supplier and enter all of the invoices from one-off suppliers to this single record. You use the Single Payment payment method to indicate that each transaction (invoice) will be paid for separately, and reference the supplier's address on the transaction.