Classifying Vendors

The Vendors step looks at every payee name in your expense lines and proposes a match. As with Accounts, you are confirming or correcting a proposal rather than starting from a blank list.

Two kinds of vendors

URBI keeps two separate vendor lists, and it is worth knowing the difference before you review this step:

• Accounting vendors, the vendors you pay bills to (utilities, insurance, suppliers, and so on). These live in your accounting chart.
• Service-ticket vendors, the contractors and repair companies used for maintenance and service tickets (also called operation vendors). These are a separate list from your accounting vendors.

URBI tries to match each payee name against both lists, along with any name you have previously confirmed as an alias for a vendor.

Steps

1. Review each vendor line. URBI shows its best match, if it found one, or a proposal to stage a brand-new vendor.
2. If the proposed match is correct, accept it and move on.
3. If the match is wrong, or there was no match, click Map to existing and search. The search groups results into accounting vendors and service-ticket vendors, so you can pick the right kind of vendor rather than only the right name.
4. If a payee genuinely is not in either list yet, stage it as a new vendor. It will be created when you commit.
5. If a line does not actually represent a vendor transaction (for example, it was picked up in error), use Exclude to leave it out of the import.
6. Once every vendor line is resolved, click Continue to move to Units.

Good to know

• Nothing is created in either vendor list until you commit. Staged new vendors and confirmed matches are only proposals until then.
• Because URBI tracks which list a vendor came from, your reporting later on stays accurate, an accounting-vendor payment and a service-ticket-vendor payment are never mixed up just because the names look similar.

Next: Mapping Payers to Units.