Time & money
Vendors
The suppliers the firm actually pays: onboarded, contactable, and with bank-detail changes put through approval.
A vendor is an expert witness, a process server, a court reporter, a printer, a software subscription: anyone the firm pays who is not staff. Holding them as records means an expense can name a real supplier rather than a string somebody typed, and the firm can answer what it spends with whom.
There is no login behind a vendor, so their email and phone are required rather than optional: a supplier nobody can contact cannot be sent a purchase order or chased over an invoice.
The service vocabulary is deliberately its own rather than borrowed from expense categories, and the gaps are the useful part. A filing fee, court fee or regulatory fee is money paid to a court or a registry. There is no supplier to onboard, so an expense in a statutory category does not prompt for a vendor at all.
The supplier record
- Individual or organisation, with active, inactive and blocked status
- Service types spanning expert witnesses, process serving, court reporting, transcription, private investigation, legal research, medical records, couriers, travel, printing, office supplies, technology, telecoms, facilities, security, marketing, training, professional services, insurance and recruitment, plus free text for anything the list misses
- Tax identifier, registration number, engagement dates and notes
- Required contact email and phone, with additional addresses and numbers alongside
- Who onboarded them, and when
Bank details
- Bank accounts held against the vendor
- A staged approval required before a change to bank details takes effect, each stage recording who acted, when, and any note
- One approval per stage per account, so a change cannot be waved through twice
What connects to them
- Expenses paid to the vendor
- Contracts and correspondence stored as documents against the record
- Spend by supplier reported in analytics, in the firm's base currency