Know who can do the work—and what you still need to verify.
Keep each supplier’s contact details, services, pricing terms, tags, and notes in your business record. Invite a vendor by email to maintain a separate capability profile. Outreach, replies, documents, and performance evidence stay separate unless your engagement explicitly connects them.
The Vendor Record Contract
Two records. Two owners. One deliberate handoff.
01
Your buying record
Your team records contact details, services, pricing and payment terms, status, tags, notes, and a preferred communication method.
02
Their capability profile
After accepting an optional invitation, a vendor can maintain a separate profile for capabilities, service area, availability, lead time, and portfolio links.
03
The verified link
Treat the records as connected only where identity and permissions are verified. An email match or shared vendor ID is not a universal history.
Record To Verified Fit
Structure the facts. Keep the handoff inspectable.
Invitation, acceptance, profile ownership, lookup, and selection remain separate steps rather than one implied communication stream.
Illustrative managed flow. Access, invitation delivery, profile fields, and buying links depend on the configured engagement.
01
Record what you know
Create the internal vendor record from facts your organization is authorized to store.
02
Choose whether to invite
An authorized user may initiate onboarding. Adding a directory record does not contact the vendor.
03
Keep delivery states separate
A provider result, recipient delivery, token acceptance, onboarding, and later activity are different evidence states.
04
Let the vendor maintain fit
After acceptance and sign-in, the vendor can maintain and pause its own capability profile.
05
Search active profiles
Authorized staff or governed AI can assist lookup by need, capability, region, availability, and lead time.
06
Verify and decide
A person verifies identity, terms, documents, and fit before selection or a downstream buying decision.
Lookup Mandate
A match is a lead for review—not a verified supplier.
Profile lookup can combine vector and lexical search with a fallback when the vector index is unavailable. It assists discovery; it does not validate identity, insurance, certifications, portfolio claims, pricing, capacity, or commercial fit.
Human Verification
Need + capability + region + availability + lead time → candidate profile
A named owner reviews the source fields, contacts the vendor through an authorized channel, verifies the required evidence, and decides what happens next.
Evidence States
Each state confirms one event—not the entire relationship.
01
Internal record
The organization created or updated a tenant-scoped vendor record.
02
Invitation attempted
An authorized onboarding email was initiated and returned a provider result.
03
Profile onboarded
The invite token was accepted and a separate vendor-user profile exists.
04
Buying record linked
An RFQ, bid, task, contract, cost item, or PO explicitly references the vendor.
Access & Ownership
Your buying notes stay yours. Their profile stays theirs.
Your organization controls its internal vendor records, buying permissions, and explicit downstream links. A vendor controls edits to its own capability profile and sees only its permitted assigned-work summary.
Your business data is exportable in documented, usable formats. Customer-specific templates, mappings, reports, integration code, and documentation transfer only as identified in the agreement. Vendor-owned profiles, supplier systems, email providers, third-party services, hosting, Grove, and Connected Spaces shared code remain separate.
Vendor-management questions, answered.
What the directory stores, what onboarding changes, and what still needs a verified workflow.
The enabled buying module supports a tenant-scoped vendor directory with contact details, service information, pricing and payment terms, status, tags, notes, preferred communication method, search, and filtering. Separately, an onboarded vendor can maintain a capability profile and view a limited read-only assigned-work summary.
No. Creating an internal vendor record does not contact the vendor. External outreach requires a separate authorized channel or an explicitly initiated onboarding invitation.
The optional invitation starts onboarding. The invitee must accept the token, register, and sign in before maintaining a vendor profile or viewing the vendor portal. A provider send result does not by itself prove recipient delivery, reading, acceptance, or response.
No general vendor conversation, ticket, or inbound-reply rail is implied. Notes and explicitly linked buying records can provide context, but work-request emails, replies, acknowledgements, and issue resolutions are not automatically aggregated into a vendor history.
Not through the current vendor-management workflow. Follow-up cadence, channel, authority, and response evidence require a separately configured process.
An onboarded vendor can maintain contact details, capabilities, description, service area, availability, lead time, and portfolio URLs, and can pause its profile. That profile is separate from your organization’s internal pricing, notes, and buying record.
No. Portfolio links and stored fields are not document verification. Any rating, delivery, response, certification, or performance claim needs a documented source, definition, period, and verification state; the current directory does not universally calculate those metrics.
Governed AI can assist read-only lookup of active profiles by need, capability, region, availability, and lead time. Mutating or invitation tools remain permission-scoped and approval-gated. AI does not autonomously contact, chase, negotiate with, rate, verify, or select a vendor.
RFQs, bids, tasks, contracts, cost items, and purchase orders may reference a vendor ID when explicitly linked. Those references do not create a universal timeline, reconcile invoices, or prove communication, fulfillment, or payment.
No. Grove is a separate supplier marketplace product. Marketplace discovery, buyer-to-supplier quoting, negotiation, fulfillment, logistics, payments, and Supplier Group workflows are not implied by this core vendor-record page.
Your organization controls its internal vendor records, buying-module permissions, and explicit downstream links. A vendor controls edits to its own capability profile and sees only its own permitted work summary. Customer-specific templates, mappings, reports, integration code, and documentation transfer only as identified in the agreement. Vendor-owned profiles, supplier systems, email providers, third-party services, hosting, Grove, and Connected Spaces shared code remain separate.
Continue The System