Supplier portal
Share a portal with your suppliers so they can track purchase orders and contracts and report delivery progress.
The supplier portal gives each supplier their own page (no login) where they see only THEIR purchase orders and contracts and report delivery progress. It mirrors the customer and partner portals: access via a signed link (HMAC), isolated per organization and per supplier.
Registering a supplier
A supplier is a Company whose "Company type" field is "Supplier". Register it as usual under Companies (or via the "New supplier" button on the Suppliers screen).
Recording purchase orders
Create "Purchase orders" and set the Supplier (lookup to the company), amount, date and expected delivery. The internal status (Draft, Sent, Confirmed, Received, Cancelled) is controlled by your team and is NOT changed by the supplier.
Supplier portal (signed link)
On the Suppliers screen, click "Copy portal link" on the supplier's row and send it to them. The link is signed (no login required) and leads to a page where the supplier:
- Sees their purchase orders (number, amount, status, expected delivery).
- Sees the contracts shared with them (amount, term and status).
- Reports progress on an order: picks a status (Confirmed, In production, Dispatched, Delivered) and sends a message (e.g. tracking code).
The progress the supplier sends is stored as a "Supplier status" and "Supplier message" on the purchase order itself, in fields separate from your team's internal status. A supplier can only update orders that belong to them.
Vendor 360 profile
Besides the Company of type Supplier used on purchase orders, there is a dedicated "Vendors" object for the 360 profile: type (product, service, provider, manufacturer, distributor), criticality, lifecycle status and a "Homologation stage" (from registration request to periodic reassessment) to track the qualification funnel.
To qualify a vendor, use "Request homologation": the request runs through the approval chain you set up (finance, legal, compliance, as many levels as you want). Once approved, the vendor becomes "Qualified" with a validity date; when the validity expires, it moves back to "Under reassessment" on its own.
Third-party risk
On the partners console, the "Third-party risk" section assesses vendors and partners by risk dimension (operational, financial, security and others, each from 0 to 100). The system consolidates a single score and classifies criticality (low, medium, high or critical). Reassessing the same third party updates its profile rather than creating a new one. The dashboard shows how many are critical, high risk and due for review. Use "Accept risk" to record formal acceptance, which runs through the approval chain (if a policy exists); when the review date passes, the profile reopens on its own for a fresh assessment.
RFQ · Vendor quotes
The "RFQ · Vendor quotes" section lets you request quotes and compare proposals before buying. Create the RFQ with a title and the product; then record each vendor's proposal (price and lead time in days). The system ranks proposals from cheapest to most expensive and highlights the best price and the best lead time, so you can decide clearly. When you pick the winner, the RFQ is marked decided, the chosen proposal becomes "selected" and the others "declined". The purchase order itself is still created in the "Purchase orders" object.