Set up and maintain suppliers in the Suppliers pages to record information about individuals and companies from whom you purchase goods and services. You can also enter employees whom you reimburse for expense reports. When you enter a supplier that does business from multiple locations, you store supplier information only once, and enter supplier addresses for each location. You can designate supplier addresses as payment, purchasing, RFQ only, or procurement card locations. For example, for a single supplier, you can buy from several different addresses and send payments to several different addresses. Most supplier information automatically defaults to all supplier sites to facilitate supplier site entry. However, you can override these defaults and have unique information for each site.
Note: Suppliers can have can have multiple addresses and each address can be used by an operating unit through a supplier site record.
The system uses information you enter for suppliers and supplier sites to enter default values when you later enter transactions for a supplier site. Most information you enter in the Suppliers pages is used only to enter defaults in the Supplier Sites regions. When the system enters that information in a later transaction, it only uses supplier site information as a default, even if the supplier site value is null and the supplier has a value. If you update information at the supplier level, existing supplier sites are not updated.
When you enter a supplier, you can also record information for your own reference, such as names of contacts or the customer number your supplier has assigned to you.
This chapter includes the following topics:
The Oracle eBusiness Suite has a single repository called the Trading Community Architecture (TCA) to store information about your trading partners. TCA provides a single common definition that can be used to identify customers, suppliers, and organizations that provide you with goods or services, and are in turn, a customer of your own products or services. The TCA repository stores the key elements that define an organization, identity, business locations, and key contacts, so that different Oracle products use a common trading partner definition.
A range of information that can viewed through the Suppliers pages is also available through the Customers Online pages.
Oracle's eBusiness Suite maintains a single definition for supplier records that can be used by a range of applications within the suite. Five Oracle financial applications use the Suppliers pages: Payables, Purchasing, Assets, Property Manager, and iSupplier Portal. If you use more than one of these products, supplier information is shared with the other product(s). In addition to the supplier name and address, Payables and Purchasing require you to enter additional information about the supplier. Assets and Property Manager require no additional information. However, for any product, you can record a variety of other supplier information in the many optional fields.
iSupplier Portal allows deploying organization to grant suppliers access to order, receipt, invoice, and payment details stored in Purchasing and Payables products for that supplier. In addition, you can grant the supplier the privilege to view their profile information and provide online updates that need to be reviewed before they can be used to update the master supplier profile.
Before entering invoices for a supplier, you must enter at least one pay site for the supplier.
The following examples show how entering additional supplier information in the Suppliers pages can help you manage your Payables system:
Record bank account information that Payables uses to generate an electronic payment for the supplier site.
Assign a default Pay Group or Payment Priority to a supplier or supplier site so that Payables defaults that Pay Group or Payment Priority to all invoices you enter for that supplier site. You can initiate a payment batch for a specific Pay Group or a range of Payment Priorities.
Select the Hold Unmatched Invoices option for a supplier or supplier site to have Payables automatically apply a hold to any invoice you enter that is not matched to a purchase order or receipt.
Create a supplier and link it to an employee so you can pay the employee's expense reports.
Before entering purchase orders for a supplier, you must enter at least one purchasing site for the supplier.
The following are examples of how entering additional supplier information can help you manage your Purchasing system:
Purchasing uses supplier and supplier site information to enter default values, such as Freight Terms and Shipment Method for all of the supplier's purchase orders. See: Entering Purchase Order Headers.
Define receiving control options to ensure that products you receive are within the tolerances you specify and the guidelines you choose. For example, you can specify a Quantity Received Tolerance, and a range of days in which you will allow receipt of shipments. See: Define Receiving Options.
Oracle Assets uses only the Supplier Name, Supplier Number, and Inactive On date.
Record additional supplier information for your own reference.
Payables imports lease invoices from Oracle Property Manager. You must enter at least one pay site for a supplier before importing invoices from Oracle Property Manager.
Oracle iSupplier Portal allows deploying organization to grant suppliers access to order, receipt, and payment details stored in purchasing and payables products for that supplier. The supplier can provide order acknowledgements and then confirm shipping details using an Advanced Shipping Notice. Following receipt, the supplier can use the PO details stored in the system to create invoices, greatly reducing any clerical errors. You can grant suppliers the privilege to view their profile information and provide online updates. These updates need to be reviewed before they can be used to update the master supplier record.
If you use the Multiple Organization Support feature, you cannot enter the following fields at the Supplier level: Liability account, Prepayment account, Distribution Set, Invoice Tax Code, and Future Dated Payment account. You can enter these fields only at the supplier site level. See: Oracle E-Business Suite Multiple Organizations Implementation Guide.
The Supplier pages provide you with complete access to all of the supplier attributes, allowing you to do things, such as create new suppliers, update location information for the supplier, and add new payment bank account information. Function security can be used to enable or disable user access to each of the Supplier pages to allow you to control which elements of the supplier attributes can be accessed or updated by each user. This allows you to segregate the duties that users can perform by setting up a range of responsibilities that provide access to different sets of the Supplier pages which assist you in conforming to separation of duties requirements. For example, by default, you could prevent most users from accessing the banking details for suppliers, and grant a limited set of users a responsibility that includes access to a supplier's banking information.
You can either grant full update access to your users or grant them read-only access to the Supplier pages. You can also grant access to users to view all supplier records or only to view Standard Suppliers or Employee-Suppliers. This allows you to restrict the users that can access employee-supplier records that contain sensitive personal information for the employee that is used to pay their expenses.
A single global setting is used to control the supplier numbering method for the entire eBusiness Suite instance. You can set this to Manual so that you can assign your own supplier numbers when you enter suppliers, or, if you enable the Automatic Supplier Number Entry Payables System Setup option, the system automatically assigns supplier numbers for you.
You cannot enter a new supplier with exactly the same name as an existing supplier. However, if you do get duplicate suppliers in your system, you can merge them. For example, you may inadvertently enter both Orion Corporation and Orion, which the system accepts as two separate suppliers. You can merge both into a single supplier record. When you submit Supplier Merge, you can choose to update the associated purchase orders and invoices to refer to the merged supplier. See also: Supplier Merge Program.
Suggestion: Use a naming convention that minimizes risk of separate entries of the same supplier under different names. For example, if you consistently spell the full name of a company, do not enter both Orion Corp. and Orion Corporation.
You can define Financials, Payables, and Payables System Setup options to speed both supplier and invoice entry. The system defaults the values you enter for certain Financials, Payables, and Payables System Setup options to each supplier you enter. That is, the values for these options become the defaults for the corresponding options in the Suppliers pages. From the supplier, the system defaults values to corresponding fields for each new supplier site you enter. Payables defaults the values you enter at the supplier site to each invoice you enter for the supplier site. Payables enters defaults for your convenience and you can override most defaults during supplier entry and during invoice entry. See also Invoice and Invoice Batch Default Chart.
Note: Updating default information at the supplier level does not update existing supplier sites. To update existing supplier site values, do so at the supplier site level.
You can define Financials and Purchasing options to speed both supplier and purchase order entry. The system defaults the values you enter for certain Financials and Purchasing options to each supplier you enter. That is, the values for these Financials and Purchasing options become the defaults for the corresponding options in the Suppliers pages. From the supplier, the system defaults values to corresponding fields for each new supplier site you enter. Payables defaults the values you enter at the supplier site to each purchase order you enter for the supplier site. Payables enters defaults for your convenience and you can override most defaults during supplier entry and during invoice entry. See also: Purchase Order Defaulting Rules.
Oracle Payables integrates with Oracle E-Business Tax to provide tax services for invoices. For information on levels at which you can default tax information based on supplier, see: Taxes on Invoices.
You can set up the default transaction tax information for a supplier and supplier site in the Tax Details and Tax and Reporting regions of the Suppliers page.
If you enter a supplier that is in the European Union (EU), you must first specify its country as an EU member state. See: Countries and Territories. When you enter an EU supplier that is registered to pay Value-Added Tax (VAT) charges, enter the VAT registration number as the Tax Registration Number for the supplier. When you are doing business in the EU with an EU supplier, you record VAT taxes for reporting purposes; however, you do not pay them to the supplier if you use offset taxes. To use offset taxes, you must enable the Allow Offset Taxes option in the Suppliers: Tax and Reporting page. When you use Offset taxes, Payables eliminates your VAT tax liability while maintaining a record of all VAT taxes you need to report.
Define a supplier as federally reportable by enabling the Federal option and entering a value for Income Tax Type (1099 MISC Type) in the Suppliers page.
If you enter a purchase order for a 1099 supplier, then Oracle Purchasing retains the Income Tax Type information at the purchase order line level. The purchase order value always defaults to invoices matched to a purchase order, (even if the purchase order value is null and the Supplier has a value).
For unmatched invoices, if you do not use a Distribution Set to create invoice distributions, Payables uses the supplier's income tax type as the default value. If you use a Distributions Set to create invoice distributions, Payables uses the default income tax type from the Distributions Set as the default value.
Also, to set up a federally reportable supplier, select a site to be the income tax reporting site by enabling the Income Tax Reporting Site option in the Suppliers: Tax and Reporting page. See also: Entering Invoices for Suppliers Subject to Income Tax Reporting Requirements.
If you participate in the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Combined Filing Program, you can also define a supplier as state reportable by enabling the State reporting type code in the Tax and Reporting page. Payables uses the state reportable status of a supplier for reporting purposes only. You can create custom reports to satisfy a tax authority's reporting requirements.
If the tax reporting name is different from the supplier name, enter it in the Reporting Name field in the Tax and Reporting page. Payables uses the Reporting Name to produce documents for the IRS. If you report electronically, select an Organization Type in the Tax and Reporting page. For more information, see Tax Reporting Information.
If you enter nine zeros, 000000000, as the value for the Tax Identification Number (TIN) for a supplier, then the TIN will appear as null on the following reports: 1099 Electronic Media Report, 1099 Forms, or the Tax Information Verification Letter. You can enter this value (000000000) for suppliers that are waiting for their TINs and for whom you need to record 1099 payments.
You can enter up to three address lines when you enter a supplier, but the 1099 Form only provides space for one address line. Payables uses the first supplier address line from the Suppliers: Address Book page and adds as much as possible of the second and third address lines if there is available space in the 1099 Form. Payables prints a maximum of thirty characters in the address field of the 1099 Form. Similarly, Payables prints up to 33 characters for the combination of the City, State, and Postal Code. Because of the space constraints, you may want to implement a standard for entering addresses to ensure that the 1099 has a complete mailing address when it is printed.
You can use the Tax Information Verification Letter to request that your suppliers provide or verify their tax information. See: Tax Information Verification Letter.
Enter withholding tax information for a supplier in the Suppliers: Tax Details page. Select Allow Withholding Tax if you want to enable withholding for a supplier or supplier site, and select a default Withholding Tax Group that Payables will default to all invoices you enter for the supplier site. For more information, see: Withholding Tax Overview.