Suppliers

Suppliers

Suppliers live in one place: the supplier portfolio (Suppliers in the app rail). It is both halves of the relationship, not a settings form. Settings → Suppliers holds supplier settings (the favicon preference and the list of hidden and archived suppliers) and links across to the portfolio for everything else.

The list is where you read how a supplier is performing: choose 1w, 1m, 6m, or 12m for its sales, share, GP, promotion, and year-on-year figures, then read current stock, cover, open tasks, lead time, and range size alongside them. That is what you open to decide who to call. Selecting a supplier opens their profile, where you correct what Twelfth believes: the lead-time override, the website, and the notes your team keeps.

Display (beside the search box) chooses which columns the list shows. It opens showing lead time and SKUs, the two a buyer scans for, with units, GP and declared coverage a tick away. The choice is remembered on this browser, for this table only, and is yours alone: it does not change what anyone else sees.

You see your own lines

Supplier figures are scoped to your remit, the same way tasks are. Several buyers often share a supplier, each owning different categories under it, so the units, GP and SKU count you see cover your lines under that supplier rather than the whole relationship. An owner or admin, who can see every remit, sees the whole thing.

The Me / All workspace view in the app header says which reading you are getting, so a partial rollup is never mistaken for the total. Buyers who can only read their own remit do not need that switch and will not see it.

What Twelfth measures, and what it can’t

• Trading: sales value, share of selection, GP%, promotion penetration, and year-on-year growth over the selected period.
• Reliability: the lead time in force, the share of the range that declares one, and typical case pack.

Lead time from receipts is measured where the purchase-order history allows it: the median number of days from a PO being raised to its stock being received, over the last 24 months, with how many receipt lines it rests on.

Three things are deliberately shown as not measured, with the reason:

• Lateness, delivery slip and fill rate need an expected date and an ordered quantity to compare each receipt against, and the source does not carry them.
• Trade spend is not captured anywhere in the warehouse. The pipeline emits the column as an explicit NULL so the gap stays visible rather than being faked.

Supplier-level annual revenue is not carried either. It arrives from Retail Express at supplier grain with no category breakdown, so it cannot be shown per buyer without inventing the split. Every other number here is built from SKU-level facts that attribute cleanly.

A number Twelfth does not have is shown as an em dash, never as zero. A supplier with no data must not read as a supplier doing no business.

Partial figures and data coverage

Sellable units, Physical on hand and Stock at cost add up only the products that report a figure. A product the source sends no count or cost for is left out of the total, never counted as zero, so a supplier’s total is a floor rather than the whole range.

• Partial beside a figure means fewer than 75% of the supplier’s products reported it. Hover the figure for the exact count, for example “78 of 113 products report physical units (69%); the other 35 are unknown, not zero”, followed by the stock date.
• A figure covering 75% or more carries no mark, because the total is close to the whole range. Hovering it still gives the count.
• A figure covering every product has no coverage note.
• Days’ cover is never marked partial. A product with stock and no sales is left out of a cover ratio on purpose, so the gap is expected.
• Turn on the Data coverage column (under Display) to see each supplier’s weakest coverage as a percentage and sort by it. Exports always include the counts, because a spreadsheet has no hover.

Each total has its own coverage. A product the source counts but does not price is in Physical on hand and out of Stock at cost, so the two can show different counts for the same supplier.

Lead times: never a default

A buying check needs to know how long a supplier takes to deliver. Twelfth never assumes one. For each supplier it uses, in order:

1. A lead time a buyer set. It is labelled with who set it.
2. The lead time measured from receipts, when the receipts can be trusted: at least 20 receipt lines, and fewer than 15% of them received the same day the PO was raised. It is labelled “from 1,240 receipts”.
3. Nothing. Some suppliers’ POs are raised when the stock arrives, so their receipts say a day or less when the real lead time is weeks (“receipts look unreliable: 19% same-day”). That figure is offered as a suggestion, never used. Until a buyer sets a lead time, the supplier’s products are not checked.

Trade-in stock bought over the counter is never ordered from a supplier, so it is never checked.

You don’t have to come here to fill them in. On a routine that checks buying (a planned buy, the sell-out scan or a store transfer), open the routine’s page, go to Setup, and edit its Products row: it lists the suppliers in that scope with no usable lead time and asks once for each. Where receipts suggest a figure it is shown beside the box with a Use button, but it is only saved if you type a figure or press Use. What you enter there is saved to the supplier, for every buyer.

Supplier profile

Select a supplier to open their profile:

• Lead time: the real order-to-delivery time in days. Leave it empty to use a reliable receipts figure, or to leave it unknown. Whoever sets it is recorded, so a lead time is never a bare, unexplained number.
• Minimum order quantity and minimum order value: the supplier’s terms, for every product unless a product says otherwise. A minimum order value is shown on the supplier’s orders and never stops one.
• Website and email response time: reference details for the buying team. Twelfth checks likely website domains for a live page whose title and description match the supplier, then autosaves the strongest match. A bare domain like acme.com is still fine when correcting it manually.
• Notes: an append-only stream of what the team learns over time (MOQs, seasonal closures, contacts). Notes accrete rather than overwrite, so the supplier’s context builds up; future sources can add extracted notes alongside handwritten ones.

You can also give the chat a supplier’s terms: “make Lego’s lead time 6 weeks”, “AID’s MOQ is 12 units” or “the minimum order for Mattel is $500”. You can also paste a supplier’s email that states a lead time. Either way, the chat shows a card with each term as it is now and as it will be. Nothing changes until you press Apply, and the terms then hold for every buyer. A lead time taken from a supplier’s email also keeps their words as a note on the supplier.

Supplier currencies and exchange rates

Open a supplier’s Facts tab to set an optional Supplier quote currency. Leave it on Workspace default (AUD) for ordinary local quotes, or choose USD or another currency for that supplier. The workspace currency is AUD unless the workspace is configured otherwise. An explicit currency on a row, in its cost value, or in the cost column heading takes precedence over either default. Conflicting or invalid currency labels remain unresolved. Unlabelled prices and a bare $ use the supplier default, then the workspace currency.

The default is captured with each new imported offer that uses it. Changing or clearing it later does not reinterpret saved offers, invoices, sales, stock valuations, minimum-order values or raised orders. Minimum-order values continue to use the workspace currency shown beside the field.

Currency & conversion shows the supplier-to-workspace reference rate, its observation date and its source. Rates come from Frankfurter, which publishes daily reference rates from central banks and official sources. The latest observation may be from an earlier day, particularly on weekends or holidays. It is not a bank settlement quote. Supplier portal prices on product pages show their original currency and an approximate workspace-currency equivalent, using the current reference rate rather than a historical accounting rate.

Base-currency prices use the ordinary symbol, such as $100.00, without repeating AUD. Foreign prices show their code, such as USD 100.00, with an approximate AUD amount underneath. Chat buying cards use the same display. The rate’s source and observation date sit beside the conversion or in its hover detail. Chat can also look up the dated reference rate for a conversion in its answer. Estimates do not change recorded order costs. Mixed original currencies stay separate; a single budget or shared price break needs costs in one currency.

There is no daily FX table in the current app schema. The shared reference-rate service reads Frankfurter and caches observations; Retail Express invoice conversion values remain historical invoice data, rather than today’s FX feed.

Choose Preview a mixed-currency cost to add separate items or cost components. For example, enter USD 100 for goods and AUD 20 for freight: the preview converts the USD component and adds the AUD component once. The original totals remain grouped by currency. Add deposits, fees and tax as their own components; all amounts are non-negative costs, so this preview does not model credits or refunds.

An optional agreed rate overrides the reference for that currency in the preview—for a contracted rate or a bank spread. The direction is always shown: 1 USD = … AUD. Clearing the override returns to the reference rate. Missing rates leave the full total unknown until you supply one. A cached rate used during an outage is explicitly labelled.

The preview is temporary and is not saved to an order. It does not change purchasing quantities, budgets, margins or the currency in which an order is raised. Saved purchasing decisions retain their existing price and currency basis.

Hiding or archiving a supplier

Two items in the ⋯ menu beside a supplier’s name take it out of the way. Both apply to everyone in the workspace, so only owners and admins can use them.

• Hide supplier… is for a supplier nobody buys from: packaging, a trade-in bucket, an internal code.
• Archive supplier… is for a supplier the workspace has stopped dealing with. It asks you to confirm, and records the date.

Either way, the supplier:

• leaves the supplier list, the rail, every supplier picker, @-mentions and ⌘K search;
• has its open suggestions closed;
• keeps its range, notes, projects and decisions. Badges and links to it on past work still open its page. An archived supplier’s page says it is archived.

Settings → Suppliers → Hidden and archived suppliers lists them all. Unhide or Unarchive there, or from the supplier’s own ⋯ menu, offers the supplier again and brings back the suggestions that were closed.

Cover rules

A cover rule sets how much a planned buy orders for each line on future runs. It is a number of days of cover, a number of units, or a number of cases (the line’s carton size). It can apply to one SKU, a supplier, a category, a remit or all lines, and it is yours unless an owner or admin sets it for the whole organisation.

There are two ways to set one:

• On an order task. Change the cover, then choose Use N days for supplier on future runs. That saves your cover rule for that supplier.
• In the chat. For example, “set my cover for All Interactive to 21 days” or “keep 2 cases of SKU-123”. The chat saves nothing by itself. It shows a card under its answer with the rule in force now, the new rule, who it is for and how many of your lines it reaches. Press Apply to save it, or Dismiss. After you apply it, Undo puts back the rule it replaced.

Settings → Suppliers → Cover rules lists every rule you work under, with who set it and when. Use Change or Remove on a rule there. When an order task’s cover comes from a rule, the cover’s description links to that rule.

A planned buy picks the cover for each line in this order:

1. The cover chosen on the order task.
2. Your cover rule, then the organisation’s. Within each, the most specific rule applies: SKU, then supplier, category, remit, all.
3. The routine’s fixed cover.
4. The days to the routine’s next run plus the supplier’s lead time.
5. A 28-day default, flagged on the line.

A rule in units or cases is converted to the number of days that much stock lasts at the line’s forecast rate. A rule in cases is skipped for a line whose carton size is unknown, and the line says so. The organisation’s max cover still caps every order.

Activity

A supplier’s page opens on Activity: their open tasks, and how work on their products moves through your decision pipeline. You can show it by period, as a table, a flow or over time, and see how often their recommendations are followed or overridden. Supplier activity explains how to read each part. Suppliers covers every tab on a supplier’s page.

Supplier badge shortcuts

Right-click a supplier badge, or long-press it on a touch screen, to open its shortcut menu. From there you can filter the table you are currently reading to that supplier, open the supplier’s page, or show and hide supplier website icons. The icon choice is a personal preference and does not change the view for other people in the workspace, like the Display column choice above.

The same menu follows supplier badges through Tasks, Products, Decisions, category and remit product lists, and supplier ranges. If a view cannot be filtered by supplier, the menu keeps the actions that still make sense there.