Outsourcing partners, expenses, and payables get the same rigor Pilot has always given your cases: vendor profiles, 3rd-party orders, expenses traceable to cases, a vendor portal, and billing in both directions.
Each vendor has its own profile with billing and shipping addresses, contact info, payment terms, notes, and notification emails. Two simple flags define the relationship: they submit cases to you, you outsource cases to them, or both. Vendors can be invoiced, issued credits, and sent statements, just like your regular customers.
Outsourced work rolls up under 3rd-party orders, each with a 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 types: Source (a case you received from a vendor), Outsourced (a case you sent out), and Parts (pucks, resin, and abutments you ordered). They can attach to cases or stand alone for lab-level orders.
Pilot used to track only the money coming in. Expenses track the money going out: attach a receipt, add categorized line items, and pick a payment method. Every line can be allocated to zero, one, or many cases with split amounts, so each expense is distributed across the cases it actually went into.
Vendors get their own portal, invited by email like your regular customers. They can submit cases (with an external order ID), receive outsourced cases, request changes, message your lab, pay their invoices, and submit bills. Nothing a vendor does touches your data until someone on your team approves it.
Vendor contracts work like custom price lists per vendor and per direction: what they charge you and what you charge them. When an outsourced case completes, a draft vendor bill appears, priced from the active contract, for you to review and approve. Bill vendors for the cases they submit, track what each side owes, and email statements. Vendors see the same on their portal's Account page. Paying vendors' bills from Pilot isn't available yet.
Vendor management isn't generally available yet, so nothing changes for your lab until you're ready. We enable it per request.
