Supplier
A supplier is a party from which a business acquires goods or services and to which it therefore owes payment.
Also called Vendor · Creditor · Payee · Party
Why it exists
Because a business needs one place to answer "who do we owe, how much, and are we allowed to pay them?"
What it means to the business
The supplier master is the spine of payables and the control point for spend. It is where payment terms live, where tax treatment is decided, and where the bank details that money will be sent to are held. That last point makes it a security object as much as a commercial one — the master is the thing an attacker wants to change.
Prospective. Identified, not yet approved to transact.
State 1 of 4
Supplier receives Purchase Order.
Open Purchase OrderPayables fragment, the same vendor appears twice in spend analysis, and negotiated rates apply to one record while orders go to the other. Harder to spot than duplicate customers, because nobody chases a supplier for money.
Rules that must hold
- A supplier must be payable — it needs a legal name and bank details before money can move.
- A supplier with posted transactions may be deactivated, never deleted.
- In India, a supplier's GSTIN determines whether input tax credit can be claimed at all, so it is a commercial field, not an administrative one.
What commonly goes wrong
Bank details get changed on the strength of an emailed letterhead, because the field is editable and nobody owns approving it. Every other failure here is an inconvenience; this one moves money to strangers, and it is the reason supplier master changes deserve a workflow that customer master changes do not.
Edge cases
- A supplier who is also a customer — same legal entity, two records, and any netting between them is a deliberate decision.
- One-time vendors, where creating a full master is disproportionate but an unnamed payment is unacceptable.
- Suppliers who change bank details mid-relationship, which is both a routine event and the standard pretext for payment fraud.
- Subcontractors holding your material, where the supplier relationship and the stock ownership diverge.
How ERPNext models it
| DocType | Note |
|---|---|
| Supplier | `supplier_group` drives default terms and accounts; it is not a legal classification. |
| Bank Account | Linked, not embedded — which is what allows a change trail on the detail that matters most. |
| Purchase Invoice | Creates the payable. The goods event is Purchase Receipt and is separate. |
Last reviewed 2026-08-14
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