Vendor Management Overview

Vendors are the suppliers you buy from and pay: equipment sellers, repair shops, spare-parts dealers, and service providers. Rentablez gives you two connected places to work with them — one for who your vendors are, and one for what you owe them.

Two Places, Two Jobs

It helps to know which surface does what before you start:

WhereWhat it’s forPermission
Settings → Vendors (the directory)Add and maintain vendor contact records — name, phone, email, address, GST No.settings.write
Vendor Management (the module)Track the money side — bills, purchase orders, payments, and payables reportsvendors.read / vendors.write

The directory is your address book. The module is your payables workspace. You save a vendor once in the directory, then pick that vendor whenever you raise a bill or a purchase order in the module.

If you can’t see one of these areas, it’s a permissions matter. The directory sits inside Settings and needs settings.write; the Vendor Management module needs vendors.read to view and vendors.write to create or edit. Ask an admin to update your role.

The Vendor Directory

Under Settings → Vendors you keep a searchable, sortable list of every supplier. Each vendor record holds:

  • Name — the supplier’s legal or display name.
  • Contact — phone, mobile, and email.
  • Address — street, district, city, state, country, and postal code.
  • GST No. — the tax identifier, validated for format.

Rather than deleting a supplier you no longer use, you deactivate it. That keeps every past bill and purchase order intact while removing the vendor from selection lists for new records. Full steps are in How to Manage Vendors?.

The Vendor Management Module

Open Vendor Management from the main menu to work with the financial side. It has four tabs:

  • Dashboard — KPI cards for pending, paid, and overdue vendor payments, each with a count and an amount.
  • Invoices — the bills your vendors send you: record them, attach the original document, and log payments.
  • Purchase Orders — orders you raise to vendors, moved through Draft → Sent → Received → Closed.
  • Reports — a payables aging breakdown and a per-vendor statement.

Everything you record here rolls up into the Dashboard, so you always have a live “how much do we owe” snapshot. Each part has its own guide: Recording Vendor Invoices & Payments, Creating & Managing Purchase Orders, and Payables Aging & Vendor Statements.

A Typical Flow

Here’s how the two surfaces work together:

  1. Add the vendor once in Settings → Vendors.
  2. Raise a Purchase Order in Vendor Management when you buy gear, and email or download it as a PDF.
  3. Record the vendor’s bill under Invoices when it arrives, optionally linking it to that PO.
  4. Log payments as you settle up — the bill flips to Partial or Paid automatically.
  5. Check Reports to see aging balances and open a vendor’s statement.

A vendor needs an email on file for the “Email to vendor” action on a purchase order to appear. Add one on the vendor’s profile in Settings → Vendors if it’s missing.