The supplier management solution and implementation logic are visible in various places within the expense management experience in Payhawk.
Most notably, supplier management affects the following stages of the expense lifecycle:
Before submitting an expense
During the expense review process
When adding payment details
Before submitting an expense
The supplier name field is present and optional for employees when creating and submitting an expense. If an employee selects a supplier from the drop-down list, all custom expense fields that are marked for supplier-driven expense categorization will be pre-filled with the stored values for this supplier.
For example, you can set a Default-[sample] supplier. For example, an employee makes a card expense in KFC. Your Payhawk accountant prefers not to have KFC as a supplier and during the review process of the expense, they can choose Default-Food as a supplier. The next time an employee makes a card expense at KFC, the supplier will automatically be looked up as Default-Food.
Alternatively, an employee may mark a supplier as new. In this case, the supplier will not be created immediately. The Payhawk accountant or administrator doing the expense review will decide whether to create a new supplier or change the supplier to an existing one.
Only Payhawk accountants and administrators will be able to see the prompt for creating a new supplier for submitted expenses.
During the expense review process
The Supplier field is mandatory when an expense is pending review, and Payhawk accountants and administrators can either create a new supplier or pick an existing supplier from the drop-down list.
If they choose an existing supplier, the review process may continue.
If they choose to create a new supplier, the Payhawk accountant or administrator will see a prompt for adding the new supplier’s information. For more information, see the article about adding the supplier details. If any of these fields are configured as required from Settings > Expense fields, the supplier details will have to be provided when adding a supplier.
If there is an existing supplier with the same Supplier name or Tax number, Payhawk will display a corresponding error message and a duplicate supplier will not be created.
Once a supplier is added or selected from the drop-down list, the expense review can continue, following the standard expense review process.
When adding supplier payment details
To be executed, bank transfer expenses require that the supplier payment details be added. If there are no payment details stored for the supplier, Payhawk will prompt the Payhawk accountant or administrator to add them.
If the banking details are stored in Suppliers, Payhawk accountants and administrators will be able to see the screen with the self-populated banking information and add a reference.
If the banking details for the supplier have been changed from the Suppliers app before the expense is paid, Payhawk will display a warning message. The user will be prompted to choose if the supplier details that were last confirmed or the ones that have been last updated are correct. When this discrepancy is resolved or if there's no discrepancy, the user will be able to pay the expense over a 2FA through mobile confirmation.