Adding a Vendor via the User Interface

This article describes the steps required to add a Vendor to Gatekeeper via the User Interface.

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Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes

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Sections in this article:

• Create a Vendor Record
• Populate Data Automatically with AutoBuild
  • Enable AutoBuild
  • Dismiss Autobuild
  • Disable Autobuild
• Populate Data Manually
• Add Core Vendor Data
• Vendor Dates
• RAG Status
• Owners
• Relationships
• Custom Tabs

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This article will walk you through how to manually add individual Vendor records to your Gatekeeper repository. This is the simplest way to add new Vendors to Gatekeeper, but it is only recommend if you are dealing with small volumes of records.

For more methodical and scalable ways to add your Vendors, see the Additional reading articles below.

Create a Vendor Record

To create a new vendor record:

1. From the navigation menu, click Vendors.
2. Click Add, then select Vendor.

This will create a blank contract record for you to populate. Once you are happy with the data in each section, click Save & Next to move on.

Populate Data Automatically with AutoBuild

With AutoBuild enabled, you must enter the Website URL as the first step of populating the blank vendor record.

Then, after checking the website with Clearbit, Gatekeeper will automatically populate vendor core metadata for you and unfreeze the remaining fields, allowing you to continue populating and amending the data:

If you are not using AutoBuild, when adding a new vendor, Gatekeeper will immediately allow you to start populating  fields without requiring a Website URL.

Enable AutoBuild

To enable AutoBuild when creating new vendor records, follow the below steps:

1. From the navigation menu, expand the Settings option, then click Configuration.
2.  Click AutoBuild.
3. Enable the AutoBuild and AutoBuild for Vendors toggles.

Once you have enabled AutoBuild, Gatekeeper will add a Vendor AutoBuild metadata group to your data model - this is a prebuilt set of fields which can be automatically populated with details about your vendor directly from Clearbit.

Dismiss AutoBuild

If you don't want to use AutoBuild on a specific record, click enter data manually.

 

Disable Autobuild

If you do not wish to use Autobuild at all, it can be disabled so that users have to populate the vendor metadata fields manually:

1. From the navigation menu, expand the Settings option, then click Configuration.
2.  Click AutoBuild.
3. Disable the AutoBuild toggle.

Populate Data Manually

Whether using AutoBuild or not, once in edit mode, you can enter or adjust values manually as needed.

Add Core Vendor Data

In the Vendor Data section, several core data fields need to be populated to create a the vendor record:

• Vendor Name
• Status
• Type
• Approval 

In addition, the following non-mandatory fields are available to capture additional information:

• Legal Name
• Registered Address
• Company Number
• Tax ID
• External ID
• Website

If you have already set up some Custom Data Fields, they will be made available to you to populate at this stage.

 

Click Save & Next to continue populating more data in the remaining sections, and at any point click Save and Exit to store the current metadata and exit the editor, taking you to view the new Vendor record. 

Vendor Dates

In this section, you can populate key dates for the contract:

• Financial Year End - The financial end-of-year for this vendor
• Relationship Since - The date of the beginning of your relationship with this vendor

RAG Status

In this section, you can apply a Red, Amber, or Green status to the vendor and add a description to explain the rationale behind the decision.  This can be used to track a vendor's performance.

Owners

Vendor Owners are used to identify key people relating to the vendor:

• Internal Manager - The internal Subject Matter Expert of the vendor within your business
• Vendor Manager - The main point of contact (external) within the vendor's business

Relationships

Relationships allow you to link the vendor record to another vendor record within Gatekeeper, for example, if you want to store details about a company and any subsidiaries/sister companies, you can add them as separate vendor records & add relationships. See the below video for a demonstration:

 

 

When the vendor record is in edit mode:

1. From the Relationship section, click Add.
2. Search for and select the vendor you wish to link to. 
3. Select the Relationship Type
   1. If you selected Linked, enter a Description if required.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for all vendors than need to be linked, then click Save & Next or Save & Exit.

Custom Tabs

If you have created custom tabs to store additional metadata in your vendor data model, these will appear as additional sections.

Additional Reading 📚

Other ways to add vendors to Gatekeeper

📖 Import and Export Vendor Data - If migrating a large amount of vendors (e.g. from another repository), you can import a spreadsheet in csv format to create vendors in bulk.

📖 Vendor Portal Self Registration - If using the Vendor Portal, you can allow vendors to set up their own vendor records & user profiles.

🛠️ Create Your Own - Vendor Onboarding Workflow - Once your repository is set up, we recommend ensuring any new vendors go through a thorough onboarding and due diligence process. You can build and configure this workflow using our templates.

🛠️ Create Your Own - Touchless NDA - You can build this workflow to allow your Vendors to set up their own vendor records and user profiles as part of a process to generate and sign a new NDA contract.

Other settings to be aware of

📖 Configuring Additional Owners - Learn  about how to configure additional owners to capture more stakeholders involved in your Vendor relationships.

📖 Configuring Custom Data - Learn how to configure additional fields to store metadata about your vendors which is not covered by our Core data model.