Supplier Group
A Supplier Group is a collection of suppliers that have common characteristics or fall under the same category. Supplier grouping facilitates the organization, reporting, and applying common rules or defaults on multiple suppliers.
A supplier on ERPNext can also be termed a vendor. Suppliers can be distinguished from contractors or subcontractors, who typically offer specialized inputs or services to a deliverable. Suppliers themselves may be categorized based on the kind of goods, products, or services they supply.
ERPNext provides the facility to design custom categories for your suppliers, termed as Supplier Groups. Suppose you have most of your suppliers as pharmaceutical companies and distributors of FMCG. You can develop different Supplier Groups for "Pharmaceutical" and "FMCG" so that you can handle them separately with ease.
To open Supplier Group, follow:
1. Prerequisites
Before you make and use a Supplier Group, make sure the following is made first:
- Supplier: You should have at least one Supplier record so that you can assign it to a Supplier Group. Without it, the group will not have any members to group.
2. How to make a Supplier Group
- Navigate to the Supplier Group list and click on New.
- Provide a descriptive name for your new Supplier Category (e.g., "Raw Materials Suppliers", "Overseas Vendors").
- You may designate a Parent Supplier Group if this group is intended to be a sub-group under a parent category.
- When you check the Is Group box, the group will be a Parent Supplier Group and cannot be assigned to suppliers directly. It will instead be a container for sub-groups.
- You may assign a default Payment Terms Template to the Supplier Group. This is helpful when there is a shared payment policy among all the suppliers in the group. An example is hardware vendors that require 50% advance on Sales Order and 50% after shipment.
- Click on Save to save the Supplier Group.
After being saved, you can add suppliers to the group. Any defaults, for example, payment terms, will then automatically be applied to all the suppliers in that group unless overridden at the individual supplier level.
Your suppliers can be listed in either of the multiple categories available in ERPNext. Some of the predefined categories include: **Distributor, Electrical, Hardware, Local, Pharmaceutical, Raw Material, Services, etc. You can also build yourself your own custom categories based on your business needs.
The classification of suppliers into different types will make it easier to organize supplier information, reporting and managing payment and accounting. As an example, suppliers identified as Raw Material can be tracked without any dependences on suppliers identified as Services so as to have a better financial- and operation-wise insights.
3. Supplier Group Tree
ERPNext also allows Supplier Groups to be organized as a tree hierarchy as with Chart of Accounts. This helps in the formulation of a unique, multi-level, supplier categorization structure.
- To view the Tree structure, press on Tree in the sidebar in the list of Supplier Groups.
- To revert back to regular list view, select **Menu > View List.
This ranks allow easier classification and management of suppliers. In this case, there can be a top level group of Distributor followed by child groups such as Book Distributor and Electronic Distributor.
User Permissions with Hierarchy
ERPNext also has hierarchy-based user permissions for Supplier Groups.
- A user who is authorized to access a parent node, is automatically granted access to all its child nodes.
- As an example, when one can access the parent group "Distributor," the sub-groups of that parent group will automatically be given to them like the sub-group "Book Distributor" and the sub-group "Electronic Distributor" etc.
This offers a more organized and secure approach of offering access while reducing the repetition of permission settings but retains control.