Why are custom properties on vendors super valuable?

This article goes through why custom properties for your vendors are useful and how you can use them to your advantage.

What are custom properties and why do I need them?

Properties are a great way to keep a better track of your vendors, who use them and how they are used. They also provide a great search point for when you need to find specific vendor groups. To help make it more clear, this article has a few examples of properties and how they can make your lives easier. If you prefer to just get started making properties, go to this guide for a "how to".

"Department" or "Subsidiary" properties

Using the department property, you can mark up which departments use or have ownership of a specific vendor. For example you can register that marketing is the main user of the vendor Google and finance is the main user/owner of the vendor Pleo. A subsidiary property could help you keep track of vendors only used in certain branches of your organisation. Lets say your company has branches in Germany, Denmark and France. Maybe the French branch uses vendors that are exclusive to their branch. This will help you keep track of those vendors. This makes it easy for you to keep track of where the different vendors belong and how they are used in your organisation.

"In Use" and "Autorenewed" properties

As simple as they sound. A Yes/No property that tells you if the vendor is still in use or if it an old vendor you are not using anymore. It could also tell you if a vendors contract autorenews or if it needs to be renewed manually. This is helpful for basic vendor management ensuring you have the information on active and inactive vendors alike and that you know which ones you need to keep an eye on.

Contract value

Contract value could be set as a number based property representing the price of the vendors services, for example: up to 5.000, 5.000-10.000 and above 10.000. This would allow you to easily keep an eye on what vendors are have the higher cost allowing you to know where you might be able to cut costs by looking for a cheaper service or a better deal.

Furthermore in conjunction with a dept. property, you could even keep an eye on what departments are spending the most on services and better guide them to cheaper alternatives.

"Company Critical" property

Is this vendor company critical, Yes or No. Again a simple property which would allow you to determine easily which vendors provide company vital services that potentially could cause service breakdowns etc. if the service stopped working as opposed to vendors providing services where the company could go on for a while if the service broke down. This will allow you to keep an eye on how many vendors your ompany are vitally reliant on to be stable and take action accordingly if that number of companies is unreasonably high.

One last piece of advise

The important thing to remember here is that the only thing limiting your custom properties is your own imagination. You can set up whatever properties you need and use them as sorting tools and search facets making your vendor management much more easy to keep track of.