Vendors: Vendor-Related Planning

As a first step, you need to gather information and make decisions that you will use when you set up vendor accounts and their supporting entities in MYOB Advanced.

Vendor-Related Planning Steps

You need to perform the following planning tasks before you set up vendor accounts:

  • Decide whether you need to expand your chart of accounts with the accounts you will use to record your operations with vendors. For details, see Chart of Accounts.
  • Consider your actual and potential vendors, and identify the characteristics you can use to group vendors, such as the types of goods or services they provide, their currency, and the payment methods they use to accept payments. Based on these characteristics, plan the vendor classes that will be used to provide default values for new vendor accounts, so that users can create vendor accounts more easily. Also, look at the common characteristics of all the planned classes so that you can plan the default vendor class, which will be defined first and used to set up the other vendor classes.
  • Consider your actual and potential vendors with regard to the hierarchy of their companies and decide whether you need to build parent-child relations between accounts. These relations can help you meet your company's accounting and auditing requirements when you work with companies that have subsidiaries. For details, see Managing Vendor Relations.
    Note: The functionality is available if the Vendor Relations feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form.
  • Plan the structure of the identifiers to be used for vendor accounts, if this was not done during system implementation. In MYOB Advanced, the identifiers of vendor accounts are defined by the BIZACCT segmented key, whose structure is defined during system implementation. You can also configure the VENDOR segmented key (which is based on the BIZACCT key) if you want to make the structure of vendor identifiers a bit different (for example, with a different prefix) from the structure of identifiers for customer and employee accounts. For more information, see Business Account Identifiers.
  • Set up numbering sequences to be used when automatically generating IDs for Accounts Payable documents. You can set up a range of numbers, specify a separate prefix for Accounts Payable documents, and define subsequences intended for a specific branch or for a specific date. For more information, see Use of Numbering Sequences.
  • Collect information about the ways you pay your vendors for services, and consider whether you are going to use MYOB Advanced for payment processing. You will use this information to plan the payment methods and cash accounts to be used to process payments to vendors. If you are going to use ACH payments, you have to configure the required payment method. For details, see Processing ACH Payments.
  • Examine the credit management policies used by your company—for example, the credit terms offered to your company by vendors, cash discounts permitted for purchases made on credit, or automatic assignment of credit terms to vendor documents. By using this information, you can plan the implementation of company credit policy in MYOB Advanced, which is described in Setup of Credit Terms.
  • Collect information about the location or locations of each vendor and the applicable taxes. You will use this information to plan the tax zones and taxes the system will apply to purchases. For details, see Vendors: Vendor Locations and Tax Zones and Categories: General Information.
  • Plan how your organization will send documents to vendors: electronically or through postal mail. In the latter case, printing of the documents should be required before they can be released. You can define these settings for a group of vendors by vendor class, and then adjust the settings individually for each vendor account. For details, see Configuring Predefined Mailings for Customers and Vendors.
  • If subaccounts are activated in your system, plan the rule for selecting the appropriate subaccount or for combining it from multiple involved subaccounts, by using the combined subaccount functionality provided by MYOB Advanced. For details on this functionality, see Combined Subaccounts: General Information.