Vendor cards in Dynamics 365 Business Central hold all the unique characteristics of the vendor. You can set up new vendors using the vendor card and streamline your process by creating vendor templates. The vendor card is commonly known as the vendor master in other systems.

The vendor card home page stores the vendor’s detailed information. It also contains valuable information such as posting groups. The vendor is important as it is the main item in the purchasing and payables process.

Navigating Vendor Lists

Begin by navigating to the search bar in your Business Central environment to look up vendors in your company.

Click into “Vendors” for a complete list of vendors in your company.

Note that you can search and filter vendors from this list using the search option in the top menu bar.

When a vendor is highlighted in blue, their details will appear in the fact box on the right-hand side of the screen. You can click on the vendor statistics, and they will take you to a more in-depth view of the vendor details.

How to Create a New Vendor

To create a new vendor, click on the “New” button in your vendors list.

A window will open, allowing you to select a template. These templates will automatically fill in the column fields for the vendors. By creating templates for various vendor types, you will streamline the process of adding new vendors and ensure consistency of the information entered.

The following example will showcase an existing vendor and the different information and details that can be entered in the Vendor Card.

Vendor Card Information Tabs

Clicking into a vendor from your vendors list will bring up the vendor card, which contains different tabs of information about that vendor:

General

The “General” tab contains general information about the vendor:

This tab starts off with vendor No., which is a number series that is assigned to this vendor. When creating a new vendor, depending on the setup, the vendor No. will auto populate with an unsigned number series, and we can fill in the details. In this tab we also have the vendor’s name, intercompany partner code, and purchase code if applicable.

Address & Contact

Under the “Address & Contact” tab, we can populate the information related to our vendor. We can enter the address, city, zip code, phone number and email information. We can also designate and enter contact information for this vendor.

Invoicing

The “Invoicing” tab contains tax information. It will also indicate if the vendor is Tax Liable:

In “Invoicing,” under posting details, you can define posting groups to indicate how the transactions will be posted to the general ledger:

In this example, the vendor posting group is similar to vendor classes, this defines the payables posting account. The general business posting group defines the general ledger account which is used for purchases.

If a vendor uses different currency, a different currency can be selected from the currency code drop-down list, as the automatic default for transactions:

Payments

The “Payments” tab contains information about how the vendor is paid. This section includes the option to indicate a prepayment percentage, how to apply the payments, the payments terms, which is especially important, and the payment method code.

Note that you can specify the priority for vendors. This is useful when making payments to a vendor, you can filter and sort by priority.

Receiving

Lastly, is the “Receiving” tab. This tab is related to the purchasing module. Here you can specify or default to the location code, shipping methods, and items related to receiving.

Vendor Bank Detail Information

You can find vendor bank information from the Vendor Card window by navigating to Related > Vendor > Bank Accounts:

In the Vendor Bank Account List, you can store multiple bank accounts’ detailed information for a specific vendor. By clicking on the vendor code hyperlink, you can drill into the Bank Account Card:

In the Vendor Bank Account Card, you can view information about the bank branch number and the bank account number. Those details are to be used for electronic payments.

It is important to note that the information will be automatically saved to the account card once you have entered the information and tapped away from the line, there is no save button in Business Central. You can verify that your information is being saved by the indicator at the top right of the screen:

Once all relevant information has been entered for a vendor, you can begin to create payables transactions such as invoices and credit notes to the vendor.

Watch this walkthrough for more information:

If you have any questions about your Business Central environment, please contact us.