Chapter 18: Working with Vendors

Vendors include companies, people, and contractors from which your company procures products and services. They can be either direct manufacturers or resellers. In the Zoho CRM system typical vendor selection process involves the following steps:

• Evaluate your business needs and create requirements document (RFI/RFP).
• Collect information about vendors from Trade Magazines, Yellow Pages, Advertisements, referrals, and other channels.
• Send RFI (request for information) to vendors and scrutinize the primary list of vendors based on their response to your RFI.
• Send RFP (request for proposals) to selected list of vendors.
• Evaluate vendors based on the response to your RFP and conduct vendor interviews and short-list the vendors.
• Gather required information, such as product details, communication channel, product delivery process and others from the short listed vendors.
• In the Zoho CRM - Vendors module, create vendor information, such as business address of the vendor, contact information of the persons you are dealing with, products supplied /to be supplied, purchase orders for the shipments, activities related to vendors and others. In addition, you can also attach the important documents related to each vendor.
• Periodically update the vendors' details and products purchased so that you can have a better visibility on your vendors/suppliers for the future procurement.

The Vendor home page contains,

• Vendors List
• Vendor Reports
• Tools, such as Import, Export, mass transfer, and delete vendors
• Quick Create pane
• Search
• Alphabetical Search
• Custom Views
• Change Owner
• Delete
• Page Navigation

You can perform the following operations in the Vendors module:

• Navigate vendors
• Search vendors (Alphabetical search options)
• Create List views
• Create vendors (Form filling, quick create, or duplicate options)
• Import vendors
• Associate vendors with other records
• Change vendor ownership (individually or in bulk)
• Export vendors
• View reports
• Print vendors details
• Delete vendors (individually or in bulk)

• Customize Vendors

Navigating Vendors

(Access Privilege: Read permissions)

You can navigate vendors available in the Vendors List.

To navigate vendors

1. Click Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors Home page, under the Vendors List section, click the Start, Previous, Next, or End link to access the list of vendors.

Searching Vendors

(Access Privilege: Read permissions)

You can search the vendors alphabetically or filling the required information in Search box.

To search vendors

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors Home page, under the Vendor Search section, do one of the following:
   • Specify the search criteria in the Search field and click the Go button. Or
   • Select one of the alphabetical search links.
3. In the Vendors List page, list of vendors are displayed as per search criteria.

Creating List Views

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

In the Vendor List you can create/modify/delete the custom views, sort columns in the list view (ascending/descending order), search the records available in the current list view. In addition, you can modify some of the columns in standard list views. By default, the following standard list views are available in the Vendors module:

• All Vendors
• My Vendors

Note: User created list views are displayed under User Created Views category in View drop-down list.

To create custom views

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors Home page, under Vendor List section, click the Create View link.
   
   

   Note: Under the Vendor List section some of the standard list views are displayed. You can only rearrange the order of columns and more columns.

   
   
3. In the Create New View page, do the following:
   • In the View Information section, specify name of the custom view in the View Name (mandatory) field. The custom view name appears in the View drop-down list. You can also set the custom view as a default list view by selecting the Set as Default View check box.
     
   • In the Specify Criteria section, specify the filter criteria. For more details refer to the Specifying List View Criteria section.
   • In the Choose Columns section, select the columns to be displayed in the List View. For more details refer to the Selecting List View Columns section.
   • In the Accessibility Details section, select the users to whom custom list view has to be enabled. For more details refer to the Enabling View Access section.
4. Click Save. The custom list view is displayed in the View drop-down list.

Creating Vendors

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permissions)

In Zoho CRM, you can store vendor details by entering data in vendor detail form.

Note: Some of the standard fields listed below may not be visible/editable depending on your organization business process and field-level security settings. In case your organization added/modified fields please contact your System Administrator for more details about usage of the other fields.

In the Vendor: Edit form, you need to specify the vendor-related information. The following table provides descriptions of the various fields in the form.

List of Standard Vendor-related Fields

To create vendors

1. Click the New Vendor link.
2. In the Vendor: page,specify the vendor details.
   Note: Vendor Name is a mandatory field. Refer to the List of Standard Vendor-related Fields section for more details.
3. Click Save to save the vendor details.

To create vendors instantly

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In left hand-side under the Quick Create section, enter the mandatory details (Vendor Name).
3. Click Save. Vendor details are displayed in Vendors Home page, where you can update the additional details.

To create duplicate records of vendors

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendor List view page, select the vendor to be duplicated.
3. In the Vendor: <Vendor Name> page, click the Clone button.
4. In the Edit: <Vendor Name> page, modify some of the vendor details.
5. Click Save. Vendor details are displayed in the Vendor: <Vendor Name> page where you can perform the additional operations.

Importing Vendors

(Access Privilege: Data Import permissions)

You can import vendor information from other legacy applications, such as spreadsheets, documents, and others to the Zoho CRM system. You can import the vendor information If you are authorized to perform this operation. Otherwise, Import Vendors button in Vendors Home page will be hidden in your user interface. By default, vendor ownership is held up with the user, who imports the vendors. You can change the vendor ownership while importing by adding a vendor owner column in import (CSV/XLS) file and map to the Assigned To field. This will automatically assign vendors to selected users. Use the exact Zoho CRM users' names while creating the vendor import file, otherwise vendors are not created in Zoho CRM.

To import vendors from external sources    

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page under Vendor Tools section, click the Import My Vendors button.
3. In the Import My Vendors Wizard page, browse the Vendors-related data (CSV/XLS format) and then click the Next button.
4. In the Fields Mapping page, map the CSV/XLS column header with vendor fields in Zoho CRM.
5. Click the Import button. It will take a few seconds to complete the importation.
6. In the Vendors: Home page, imported vendors are displayed under the Vendors List section. You can continue the importation further or complete the operation.

Associating Vendors with Other Records

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permissions)

You can create a 360-degrees view of the vendor to display all the associated details, such as products, activities, contacts, and purchase orders.

• Products: To add products that are purchased from vendor
• Purchase Orders: To create purchase orders for procuring products from the vendors
• Open Activities: To add new tasks and events.
• Closed Activities: To track closed tasks and events.
• Attachments: To add files to the vendor record.
• Contacts: To add contacts related to vendors.

To associate Vendors with other Records

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors Home page, under the Vendor List section, select the required vendor.
3. In the Vendor: <Vendor Name> page, do the following:
   • Edit the Vendor details.
   • Create Products (See chapter <No>: Managing Activities section for more details)
   • Create Purchase Orders (See chapter <No>: Creating Emails and Creating Notes sections for more details)
   • Create Contacts: (See chapter <No>: Attaching Documents section for more details)
4. You can close the Vendor page once all the required information is updated for the vendor.

Changing Vendor Owner

You can change the owner of an individual vendor or a group of vendors.

To change owner of vendors individually

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page, select the vendor.
3. In the Vendor: <Vendor Name> page, change the vendor owner from the Vendor Owner lookup field.
4. Click Save to update the vendor owner.

To change owner of vendors in bulk

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page, go to the Vendor List section and select the check boxes corresponding to the vendors. You can also select all the vendors.
3. Click the Change Owner button.
4. In the Vendors: Change Owner page, select the user from the Assigned To pick list and click the Save button to change the owner of the vendors permanently.
   
   Note: Vendors ownership will be changed to another user, irrespective of its existing owner. Use this operation carefully, otherwise vendors belonging to different users will be changed to new user. To overcome this problem, first you may search the vendors with a required owner name then change the owner in bulk.

Exporting Vendors

Occasionally it is very useful to export the vendor details from Zoho CRM to Spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, and others for further data analysis.

To export vendors to external sources

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page under the Vendor Tools section, click the Export All Vendors button.
3. In the File Download pop-up dialog, Click Save to save the vendor details in *.CSV file format.

Viewing Reports

(Access Privilege: Read/Write permission)

You can directly access some of the standard reports pertaining to Vendors from the Vendor Reports section. In addition to reports you can access one of the dashboards in Vendors module.

By default, the following reports are displayed under Vendors module:

• Vendors Vs Purchases
• Vendors Vs Products

To view vendor reports 

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page under the Vendors Reports section, click the required Report link.
3. The Report is displayed in Reports page which can be further customized as per your requirements.

For more details about reports customization refer to Chapter 19: Working with Reports.

Printing Vendor Details

(Access Privilege: Read permission)

You can view a printable form and print the vendor details using browser's Print function.

To print vendor details

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page under the Vendors List section, select the required vendor.
3. In the Vendor: < Vendor Name> page click the Printable View link.
4. In the Vendor: < Vendor Name> page, click the Print button to print the document.

Deleting Vendors

(Access Privilege: Read/Write/Delete permissions)

Rarely, you may need to remove the unnecessary vendors, which are not tracked further. This will help you manage your vendors in a better way. You can delete vendors either individually or in bulk.

Warning: The deleted vendors are temporarily stored in Recycle Bin. If required you can restore the deleted vendors again. But if you delete vendor from Recycle Bin, you cannot restore again.

To delete vendors individually

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page, select the vendor to be deleted.
3. In the Vendor: <Vendor Name> page, click Delete.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the vendor permanently.

To delete vendors in bulk

1. Click the Vendors tab.
2. In the Vendors: Home page, go to the Vendors List section and select the vendors to be deleted using the Select check box.
3. Click the Delete button.
4. In the Confirmation dialog, click OK to delete the selected vendors permanently.

Customizing Vendors

(Access Privilege: Customize ZohoCRM.com permission)

Customization of the vendors module includes, renaming the tab name, modifying the pick list values in standard fields, adding new custom fields, modifying vendors page layout, and show/hide the related list views according to your Purchase management process requirements.

For more details, refer to Chapter 24: Customizing Zoho CRM