See everything about a vendor

Ledger › Expenses › Vendors lists everyone you buy from. Vendors appear here on their own as bills arrive, so the list fills itself in.

Each row shows how many documents arrived in the period, what you spent, anything still unpaid, and the date of the last bill. The strip above the list totals the rows you are currently looking at, so filtering to what you owe gives you that total straight away. The spend chart lives inside the row: open a vendor to see it.

The period rules the page

The period selector at the top is the same one the reports use, and it drives everything about spend: the Spend column, the totals strip, and the trend chart and document list inside an open row. Switch it to Last Fiscal Year and the whole page answers for that year.

Two things stay as they are, on purpose. The open balance and its aging are what you owe today, not during a window, so filtering them would make them wrong rather than narrower. And "All time" inside an open row is the whole relationship, which is what tells you a supplier is new versus long standing.

Finding a vendor

Sort by any column heading. Click it once to sort, click it again to reverse. The list opens on the most recent bill first, so the suppliers you are actively buying from sit at the top and dormant ones sink.

Search matches the vendor name and its email domain. The segmented control narrows the list three ways:

• All: every vendor in the book.
• Owing: only vendors with an open balance. This is the "who am I behind with" view.
• Inactive: vendors you have switched off.

Opening a vendor

Click a row to expand it. Everything about that vendor is in the panel:

• Spend: what you spent in the period, the all time total, the average bill, and the open balance, with how long you have been buying from them.
• Spend over the period: the shape of what you spend with them. TALISK_HQ picks daily, weekly or monthly bars to suit the period you chose, and the Daily · Weekly · Monthly tabs above the chart let you change that. Only the groupings the data can actually produce are offered, so a long period with monthly figures behind it will not offer Daily. Hover a bar for the date, the amount, and its share of the period.
• What you owe today: the open bills, how overdue each one is, and the aging bands. This matches the AP Aging report exactly, because it is read from it.
• Where it lands: which accounts their spend is coded to, biggest first. If one vendor is split across several accounts, TALISK_HQ says so. That is correct when you genuinely buy different things from them, and worth a look when you do not.
• Sales tax charged: the GST, HST, PST and QST on their bills.
• Bills and receipts in this period: the documents from the period, newest first, with a link to all of them. Coded to names the account each one landed in, with its number and its name, so you can check it against your chart without looking anything up. A bill you coded line by line says how many accounts it was split across, because no single account is the answer.
• What TALISK_HQ knows: the name they bill under, any other names their own documents are made out to, their domain, the names they use on your statement, and any defaults a vendor rule sets. A default category is shown by number and name, so you can read it without looking the account up, and each rule can be edited here.

The supplier statement

When a supplier mails you a statement of account, open their row and press Statement in the Spend section. You get our side of the same document: an opening balance carried in from before the period, every bill and payment in date order with a running balance, and a closing balance. Set the From and To dates to match the period printed on the supplier's statement and check it line by line. Download CSV gives the same rows as a file.

The running balance counts only what flows through your payables. Three kinds of line appear greyed out for reference and never move the balance: documents from before your books started (already inside your opening balances), bills someone paid personally, and a credit the supplier refunded. The supplier's own statement will show these, so listing them saves you wondering why a line of theirs has no match.

If the supplier is holding a credit for you, a closing block appears under the table: what you owe, what they hold, and the net position. The net position is the figure to compare against the total on the supplier's statement, because their bookkeeping nets the credit against your account.

Documents from before your books started

All time means all time. Spend includes everything you have from a supplier, including documents dated before the day your books start, so you can look back at a supplier you have been buying from for years. The All time figure says how much of it predates your books, and opening the row lists those documents under Before your books started.

One number deliberately leaves them out: the open balance. Anything you owed a supplier before your books started is already inside your opening balances, so counting it as owed today would charge you for it twice. Spend is history; the open balance is what you owe now.

When a supplier first appears here

A supplier joins this page when you approve its first bill or receipt. Nothing waiting in your review queue puts one here. A document TALISK_HQ has read but you have not accepted is still a suggestion, and a quote, a statement, a marketing attachment or an invoice you sent yourself should not leave a supplier behind after you discard it. Approving is what says this is someone you buy from.

Once a supplier is on the page, everything else from them finds it straight away, including documents still in your review queue, so their rules and line splits are applied while you are looking at the bill.

A vendor that shows nothing

A vendor with genuinely nothing on it is one whose only documents are ones this page ignores, such as a duplicate, or a bill you approved and later discarded. Empty rows are not left lying around: if you re-file a vendor's last bill under a different supplier, or delete that bill, the empty vendor goes with it. Anything you typed in keeps the row, so a vendor you gave notes, statement names or a rule stays put whether or not it has any bills yet.

A bill TALISK_HQ could not read a vendor from

When a scan or an upload cannot make out who a bill is from, it is filed with no vendor rather than under an invented one, so it will not appear under any supplier here until you open the bill and type the name. It joins that vendor straight away and brings its spend with it.

This is deliberate. Filing every unreadable receipt under one stand in supplier would add unrelated shops together and show you a buying relationship that does not exist.

Why "unpaid" can be more than the aging

The open balance counts every bill with money still owing. Aging deliberately leaves out a bill you already paid on a card whose bank line has not imported yet, because it is not actually overdue. When that happens the panel lists those bills under Not in aging with the reason, so the two numbers never look like they disagree. A bill you paid out of your own pocket is listed there too: the supplier has been paid, so what is outstanding is the money owed back to the person, which lives under Reimbursements on the Expenses page.

Editing and merging

Choose Edit vendor inside the panel to rename a vendor, set the category its bills are coded to, correct their Domain, add notes, teach it the names it uses on your bank statement, or switch it off. Statement names are what let TALISK_HQ recognise a charge as belonging to that supplier, so they are worth filling in for anything that bills under one name and charges under another.

A rule never attaches itself to a vendor on its own. It still matches bills and still applies its defaults, but which vendor it belongs to is something you say. Before, a rule quietly adopted the first vendor it happened to match, which is how a rule you wrote for one supplier could end up listed under another.

You set that from either side. In the panel, Rules lists the ones already linked to this vendor with an Unlink beside each, and Rules that match offers the unlinked ones that would fire on this vendor's bills, with a Link. On Ledger › Banking › Rules, each rule shows the vendor it belongs to and a Link to a vendor or Change vendor control. It is the same link either way, so setting it in one place shows up in the other.

Both lists lead with what a rule matches, not just what it does, and that is deliberate. A rule matches on a name pattern or a domain, never on a vendor, so a rule matching Canadian Tire also fires on anything else containing those words. Reading the match condition is how you can tell how far an edit reaches.

Changing what a rule does

Each rule under Rules has an Edit beside it. It opens Category, Currency and Tax in place, so you can change what this supplier's next bill defaults to without leaving the vendor. Save applies it, Cancel drops it.

Editing a rule changes what the next bill defaults to. Bills you have already recorded keep the category, currency and tax they have. If you want to restate documents you already have, do it on the bill itself, where TALISK_HQ shows you what will change before it changes anything.

What the rule matches is not editable here on purpose. Widening a pattern changes which suppliers the rule owns, which is a bigger decision than changing what it does, so it belongs on Ledger › Banking › Rules where you can preview the effect.

"also applies to"

When a rule also matches another supplier, a line under it says so by name, for example also applies to Namecheap, Inc. That is not a warning about something going wrong. It is telling you that an edit here also changes how that supplier's bills are coded, because the rule was never scoped to one vendor in the first place.

It appears only when it is true, which on a typical book is rarely. A rule usually covers exactly the supplier you are looking at, and a line on every rule would be noise you would learn to skip on the one rule that matters.

Two cases surprise people, and both are real:

• A short pattern catches a longer word. A rule matching MEC also matches "Namecheap", because the letters appear inside the name. TALISK_HQ matches anywhere in the name, not whole words only.
• A shared domain is not a supplier. A rule keyed on a marketplace or a free mail domain covers everyone who bills you through it, so it can name suppliers who have nothing to do with each other.

If the reach is not what you wanted, narrow the rule's match on Ledger › Banking › Rules, or unlink it here and give this supplier a rule of its own.

Domain is the supplier's own web or email address. TALISK_HQ fills it in from their bills, but a receipt you forwarded to yourself can leave your address there instead, so it is editable. It will not accept a domain belonging to one of your own connected mailboxes, because that is never the supplier's. Leaving it blank is fine.

Press Enter in the name box to save it, or use Save. If you close the editor with unsaved changes, TALISK_HQ asks before letting them go.

Category sets what this vendor's bills are coded to from here on. Bills you have already recorded keep the category they have: changing the default for the next bill is a different thing from restating the last one, so it never quietly recodes your books. The category is held by the vendor's rule, so if the vendor has no rule yet, TALISK_HQ offers to create one and says so before it does. A vendor with more than one rule is not editable in this box, because two rules can set different categories and TALISK_HQ will not guess which you meant. Edit the rule you mean directly, under Rules in the panel above.

The same panel merges duplicates. If the same supplier ended up as two vendors, open the one you want to keep, tick the others, and merge. Their bills, rules, statement names, name variants and any credit they were holding move across, and the duplicates are removed. Merging cannot be undone, and it needs full bookkeeping access.

"Also bills as"

Bills as is what TALISK_HQ calls this supplier. Also bills as lists the other names their own documents are made out to, and appears only when there are any.

It is read from the bills themselves, not from a record of what you merged. A merge moves a bill onto the vendor you kept but never rewrites the name printed on it, so the names you merged are still there to show you. That also means the line catches spellings that arrived with no merge at all, such as a supplier who once billed you with a trailing period or a store number on the end.

It is worth a glance for two reasons: it tells you a merge really did keep everything, and a name you do not recognise is a sign two suppliers have been filed as one, which you can undo by opening the bill and correcting its name.

What the numbers are not

Spend here is a running total of the documents you have captured, converted to your home currency. It is not a general ledger balance and it carries no tie-out. For a figure you report or file, use the reports: the profit and loss for spend by account, and the sales tax report for what you can claim.