Zoho Inventory

Vendor Portal

Note: This feature is available only for certain plans of Zoho Inventory. Visit the pricing page to check if it’s available in your current plan.

The Vendor Portal helps your vendors to manage purchase orders, view the payments they’ve received, upload invoices to be converted to bills in Zoho Inventory, and more! Let’s understand the use of a vendor portal with the help of a scenario.

Scenario: John’s business, ABC Limited, buys all the supplies they need from multiple vendors. Instead of communicating with all of them individually regarding orders, John can send invites to the vendors to access their respective vendor portals. In their portal, they can view purchase orders, submit invoices, and interact through comments with John regarding an order from one place.

Enable Vendor Portal

To start off, you will have to enable portal access and invite your vendor or their contact persons you’ve added in Zoho Inventory. To enable the portal:

Enable Vendor Portal

(Or)

Contact Persons

You can configure the portal in the preferences section.

Accept the Invitation

Once your vendor accepts the invitation, they will be able to view and track all their transactions, upload transaction documents and collaborate with you easily. To join the portal, your vendor should:

They will now be logged in to the portal where they can perform various functions.

Functions in the Vendor Portal

Let us see the functions that can be performed in the vendor portal.

Home

Once your vendor logs in to the portal, the home page/dashboard will give them an overview of all the transactions that took place between you and your vendor. They can view the following details:

VP Dashboard

View Purchase Orders

Documents created by you in Zoho Inventory requesting your vendors to supply specific goods along with their prices and quantities are Purchase Orders. Vendors can view the purchase orders and comment on them to negotiate the prices or add their remarks before they create the final invoice. To access the purchase orders, your vendors should:

Purchase Order Image

They will also be able to filter the purchase orders by their statuses by clicking the Show All Purchase Orders dropdown. The available filters are: All, Billed, Partially Billed and Cancelled.

Accept or Decline Purchase Orders (For Vendors)

Vendors can use the portal to accept or decline the purchase orders that were created in Zoho Inventory. When you create a purchase order in Zoho Inventory, you can send it to your vendors for review.

Once the vendor accepts your purchase order, you can go ahead and purchase the goods from your vendor. If your vendor rejects your purchase order, you can create a new purchase order and submit it for review again.

This feature comes in handy when you require the vendor’s consent to purchase goods from them.

Enable Review for Purchase Orders

Admins must enable this feature before the users send purchase orders for review. Here’s how:

Enable purchase order approval
Submit Purchase Orders for Review

Once the admins in Zoho Inventory have enabled the option to approve purchase orders, users will be be able to submit it to their vendors for review. Here’s how:

Accept or Decline PO
Accept or Decline Purchase Orders (For Vendors)

Vendors can accept or decline the purchase orders that have been sent to them from the users in Zoho Inventory. Here’s how:

You will be notified in Zoho Inventory when your vendor approves a purchase order.

Accept or Decline PO

Manage Invoices

When your vendor has shipped goods to you, they can upload a picture of the transaction’s document (invoice) to the portal, you can then verify it and accept or reject them in Zoho Inventory. Once accepted, it will be created as a bill in Zoho Inventory.

Upload Documents

To upload a transaction document in the portal, your vendors should:

Upload Document

Insight: Your vendor can upload images and PDFs of the document. The maximum file size for each document is 5MB.

The document will be in the Pending state as soon as it is uploaded. If you accept the document in Zoho Inventory, it will be converted into an invoice in the Vendor Portal. You will be able to add comments to the document by clicking it.

View Invoices

Once your vendor uploads a document, you can review and accept/reject the document. If it is accepted, it will be created as an invoice in the portal. Here’s how your vendor can view the invoice in the portal:

View Invoices

Track Payments Received

You might have made an online payment or a cash payment towards the vendor’s invoices. Your vendor will be able to view them once you record the payment manually in Zoho Inventory. This section will show the details of the amount, the payment mode and the reference transaction. To view this, your vendor should:

Payments Received

Generate Statement of Accounts

Statement of account shows a consolidated list of all the transactions carried out between your vendor and you. Your vendor can generate this statement for any period and view the payments received and balance due. To view the statement:

View Statement

Create Bills

You will be able to create bills in Zoho Inventory based on the documents uploaded by the vendor. Furthermore, you can also discuss them in the comments section.

Upload notification Documents

Pro Tip: You can hover over the document and click Convert to Bill to create bills instantly.

Convert to bill

Enable Autoscan for Uploaded Documents

If you’ve enabled the Autoscan feature in the Documents module, vital information of a document such as date, amount, etc., will be automatically captured from the uploaded document and populated while creating a new transaction.

Note: The number of autoscans that can be performed depends on your subscription. You can purchase more autoscan add-ons if necessary.

Here’s how you can enable autoscan for the documents uploaded by the vendor:

Enable Autoscan

Insight: Once you’ve enabled autoscan in the preferences section, all the documents that the vendor uploads in the vendor portal will be automatically autoscanned in the Documents tab in Zoho Inventory.

As the documents get autoscanned, you will be able to observe the following status of the documents:

Scan in progress: The document or receipt is currently being scanned.

Processed: The document or receipt has been scanned and data is captured.

Failed: The autoscan has failed. This may result due to illegible data, images which cannot be interpreted or when the language is not supported.

Once the documents uploaded by your vendor has been autoscanned in Zoho Inventory, you can convert the scanned documents to a bill manually in the Documents tab.

Warning: The number of documents you can autoscan will reduce when a vendor uploads a document in the portal.

Other Actions

Edit Address

The address you have stored in Zoho Inventory will be visible to your vendors. In case they have changed their address, they can edit them in their portal. To do this:

Edit address

Insight: Only the person saved as the primary contact by you in Zoho Inventory will be able to update the address.

Send Email

Your vendor will be able to contact you directly from the portal by sending an email. Here’s how:

Send email

Change Password

If your vendor’s password is too old or vulnerable, they can an change it easily from the portal. Here’s how:

Change password

Log Out

To log out of the portal:

Vendor Portal Preferences

The preferences section will allow you to configure the portal.

The custom options available are:

Portal Name

The portal name is unique to your organisation and it is used in the URL of the Client and Vendor Portal. This is auto-generated by default. However, you can edit the portal name, and click Save if you want to customise it.

Notify me for every activity that takes place in the portal

Enabling this option notifies you via emails and in-app notifications whenever your vendor uploads documents, adds comments or updates any details.

Notify my vendor when I comment or reject the documents

Enabling this option notifies your vendor via an email whenever you add a comment or reject the documents they had uploaded.

Allow vendors to update their contact details in the portal

Enabling this option allows your customers to add/edit their shipping/billing addresses, custom fields and other contact details in case of any changes.

Allow vendors to upload documents

Enabling this option allows vendors to upload PDFs or images of transactions that support your purchase. You can view the document and accept it to create a bill in Zoho Inventory.

Autoscan uploaded documents

Enabling this option will capture the important data from the documents that are uploaded by the vendor and will be used to create bills easily.

Allow vendors to accept/reject purchase orders

Enabling this option provides vendors the ability to accept or decline the purchase orders in the Vendor Portal.

Banner Message

The banner message will be displayed in the Home screen of the vendor portal. For example, you can say “Welcome to Zylker. Have a nice day!”

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