Introducing Vendor Management: Outsourcing, Fulfillment, and a Vendor Portal
Vendors, 3rd-party orders, expenses, a vendor portal, and two-way billing — outsourcing partners become first-class citizens in Pilot LMS.
Vendors are becoming first-class citizens in Pilot LMS!
Until now, outsourcing partners existed in Pilot as a name on a dropdown. You could send a case out, but the moment it left your building, visibility ended: no pricing reconciliation, no tracking, no communication, no record of what you owed or what you'd paid. And the money going out of your lab — parts, materials, outsourcing fees, everything else — lived in spreadsheets, receipts, or memory.
That changes today. Vendor management is a module that gives your outsourcing partners, your expenses, and your payables the same rigor Pilot has always given your cases.
Meet the Vendor Profile
Pilot LMS needed to have an ability to outsource cases. The setup was as minimal as it could be: create an Outsourcing Partner (just a name), outsource a case to that partner, and then cancel/return that case from outsource.
Every vendor now gets a full profile in the new Vendors section: billing and shipping addresses, contact info, payment terms, notes, and notification emails. A combination of two simple flags define your relationship with a vendor:
The vendor sends work into your lab through their portal — inbound production for you.
You send cases out to the vendor — the classic outsourcing flow, now fully tracked.
You may notice that some of these new properties are similar to the properties of the Billing Accounts. Indeed, Vendors can now be invoiced, taken payments from, issued credits to, and generated statements for – just like your regular customers. Moreover, since you can outsource cases to Vendors, you'll also need to be billed, pay vendors, and vendors may issue you credits. More on vendor billing below.
So, we went from a very simple, one-directional outsourcing to a more complicated bi-directional outsourcing with billing. Now we need a way to track information on these outsourced orders. Introducing a new concept: 3rd-party Orders.
3rd-Party Orders
Outsourced work now rolls up under a new concept: 3rd-party orders. Each order gets its own human-readable number, an optional external ID from the vendor's system, due and expected-arrival dates, notes, and threaded comments. Orders come in three flavors:
You received a case from a vendor. Invoicing those cases generates an invoice to the vendor — same as invoices to your regular customers.
You sent a case to a vendor. On completion, Pilot generates a vendor Bill — and since bills are your expenses, an Expense record comes with it.
Fulfillment you ordered from a vendor: pucks, resin, custom or stock abutments. Automatically generates both a vendor Bill and an Expense.
You create 3rd-party orders that are associated with cases, but also standalone orders for tracking lab-level (as opposed to case-level) orders and expenses.
Expenses, Traceable to Cases
Speaking of expenses: so far, Pilot LMS only tracked the “money-in” transactions (customer invoices, payments, and credits). The new Expenses section is money-out tracking: snap and attach a receipt, add categorized line items, and pick a payment method.
The important feature here is case allocation — every expense line can be assigned to zero, one, or many cases with split amounts. Every expense can be distributed across the cases it actually went into.
The Vendor Portal
Okay, great, we got bi-directional outsource and vendor billing, so there is quite a bit more visibility you can have over your orders. However, all information has a cost. There is a lot of new overhead that didn't exist before: your lab now has to figure out how to communicate with vendors, how to accept cases from or send cases to them, how to manage all outsource-related work queues, and how to manage vendor billing.
Introducing Vendor Portal — it solves all these issues.
Your vendors get their own portal — a login/password with email invitations, just like your regular customers. Vendors can:
To your lab with your products, files, and other relevant info, then track status in real time. Submission works exactly like it does for your regular customers, plus an External Order ID field for the case number in their system.
Accept the assignment and see everything they need, read-only.
Due date, hold, cancel, notes, product updates — requests land in your lab’s approval queue. Nothing a vendor does touches your data until someone on your team approves it.
Conversations have been extended to support vendor communications.
Vendors can pay their invoices right on the vendor portal.
All supplier transactions that happen outside of Pilot can be submitted by vendors for your approval through the portal.
While vendors can pay for their invoices, you do not have the ability to pay vendors' bills out of Pilot yet. This is the next step on our development roadmap.
Vendor Billing: Contracts, Invoices, Bills, Payments
The one thing that may be going through your mind as you're reading this: “Okay, Nikita, this is neat and all, but I don't bill vendors the same amount as I bill my customers; and my vendors don't bill me the same as they bill their customers. How do you account for that?”
To solve this problem, we're introducing Vendor Contracts. As of right now, this is a very minimalistic functionality that works essentially like a custom pricelist for your products and includes a direction (we charge the vendor vs. the vendor charges us).
Vendor Contracts complete the financial side, in both directions:
Contracts
Named, dated price lists per vendor, per direction (what they charge you, what you charge them). Contract pricing drives everything downstream.
Auto-billing
When an outsourced case completes, a draft vendor bill appears, priced from the active contract. Review and approve it.
Vendor invoices
Bill vendors for the cases they submit, with their payment terms, tax area, and shipping defaults applied automatically.
Payments
Vendors pay you online through the same payment processing you already use. (Paying vendors isn’t available yet, but you can still record them.)
Balances and statements
What they owe you and what you owe them, tracked separately, netted on their account page, and emailable as a statement.
The vendor sees all of this too: their portal's Account page shows balances, invoices, bills, payments, credits, and statements.
Rolling Out
Vendor management is not generally available yet, so nothing changes for your lab until you're ready. We'll be enabling it per request — if you'd like early access, fill out the form below and we'll turn it on for you.