In our last update, we unleashed a bevvy of improvements and fixes. One of the more notable ones was the ability to add your suppliers and vendors into JobNimbus and work with them directly.
Suppliers and vendors can be interchangeable terms referring to companies that provide materials and/or labor for your business. You can have
Previously you could add your suppliers and vendors into JobNimbus as contacts, but they weren’t part of their own segment and they weren’t very interactive.
The great thing about this update is that, if you already added your suppliers and vendors to JobNimbus as contacts beforehand, you don’t have to start from zero. In fact, the setup is exactly the same and then it’s just a matter of updating those contacts to set them to the new supplier or vendor types.
Let’s get started.
Create Your Supplier & Vendor Types
Step 1: Go to your Settings
To set up your supplier and vendor types, head over to your Settings and go to the Contact Workflows tab.
Step 2: Click “Add Workflow” to create a new Contact Type
Now, you might already have a Contact Type (or a few) that are for your suppliers and vendors. If that is the case, then skip to step 4.
Step 3: Enter the basic information
With these new workflow types, you have the ability to create as many or as few workflow types for suppliers and vendors as you’d like. That means you could just have one type for “Supplier” and that’s it, or a second for “Vendor” as well, or even separate your suppliers and vendors into several categories themselves.
Your categories could be based on the type of material or service they provide, or you can even segment these types by company name if you have several contacts from the same company and would like to make it easy to build reports and segment by company name. It’s completely up to you so be sure to take some time to decide how you want to enter your suppliers and vendors before proceeding.
Give your workflow a name, choose an icon to help you distinguish it from other contacts like customers and subcontractors, and choose if you’d like to clone a workflow. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have to clone a workflow but if you already have a supplier or vendor type, or a workflow similar to the one you’re creating now, then it might save you some time.
Step 4: Choose Vendor, Supplier (or Subcontractor)
You’ll see some checkboxes for Subcontractor, Vendor, and Supplier. Each one has a small message to help you know what checking that box means. The message goes like this: “Check this box if all contacts for this workflow are [suppliers].”
At this point, you would check the box that corresponds to this type of contact.
Vendor is slightly different than Supplier and you’ll see that in it’s explanation: “Check this box if all contacts for this workflow should be synced to QuickBooks as Vendors”. Vendor, itself, is a QuickBooks-specific category so you’ll probably only use this if you have QuickBooks enabled. If you do use this category, you might get a notice that confirms this choice, since it’s something you can’t reverse once it starts syncing with QuickBooks.
Step 5: Save
To save your new workflow, click the “Add Workflow” button.
Step 6: Create contacts (or edit existing ones) with new type
With your new contact types created, you’re ready to add your suppliers and vendors into JobNimbus as contacts (or edit your existing suppliers and vendors to set these new types).
You can choose the new types from the “Contact Type” dropdown on the top right of a the Add/Edit Contact window.
Step 7: Start using it!
It’s time to start using it and there are a few ways you can do that:
- Now when you’re sending your material orders, using the “Email Material Order” option will allow you to send those orders directly to your suppliers.
- When you want to see a list of your suppliers and vendors, you can create custom reports and add filters for the Contact Type. This allows you to create easy draw lists or just to keep track of who’s still available to order material from, etc.
This latest update is just the beginning of your ability to do more every day with JobNimbus. We’ll have more news on updates coming soon, as well as more tutorials to help you get the most out of JobNimbus.
Would you like to see a how-to on a feature or use case in JobNimbus? Leave a comment below to request one!
