Vendors | Ottimate Developer Documentation

What is a vendor?

A vendor represents an organization that provides goods or services to a company. The vendor issues invoices to the company for goods and services rendered. A vendor must exist in Ottimate before you can create invoices associated with it. Additionally, a vendor must exist in the client’s accounting software before the completed AP bill can be exported.

Fetching vendors from Ottimate

When you onboard a new account with an Ottimate-hosted integration, we automatically sync vendors from the ERP for each company under the account.

When an invoice is uploaded from an unrecognized vendor, users can create a temporary vendor in the UI. However, that invoice will remain incomplete until the temporary vendor is matched to a vendor in the client’s accounting system after syncing.

If a vendor has been mapped to an ERP vendor, the response includes the ERP-generated vendor identifier as external_id. Otherwise, this field is null.

See the /vendors API reference for complete details.

Creating vendors in Ottimate

If you are using an unsupported ERP, you can push your vendor list into Ottimate with the Vendors API. We recommend that you keep the vendor fields consistent between Ottimate and your ERP. You must include the following required fields in your request body.

Required Field	Description
name	Vendor name
ottimate_company_id	The Ottimate-generated company_id with which the vendor is associated
erp_vendor_id	The ERP-generated identifier for the vendor entity

See the /v1/vendors API specification for more information on optional vendor fields.

Net Terms

The net_terms field of an vendor represents the payment terms the company has negotiated with the vendor. When this value is optionally passed to Ottimate, we convert it into numbers to automatically calculate invoice due dates.

The net_terms field must be a string value following this template:

Accepted Format	Example	Ottimate’s Translation	Example Invoice Date	Example Due Date
Net <days>	Net 10	Number of days after the invoice date	2024-12-01	2024-12-11
n <days>	n 10	Number of days after the invoice date	2024-12-01	2024-12-11
<days>	10	Number of days after the invoice date	2024-12-01	2024-12-11
Due on receipt	Due on receipt	Same as invoice date	2024-12-01	2024-12-01
EOM <days>	eom 10	Number of days after the last day of the invoice month	2024-12-01	2025-01-10
<days> next month	Net 10 next month	Day of the following month	2024-12-01	2025-01-10
<day> of month	10th of month	The next time that day occurs (could be current or next month)	2024-12-01	2024-12-10