In Settings → Vendor settings. There are two cards on it, and the second one is mostly a signpost.
When a vendor has gone quiet
One number: how many days of nothing before an approved vendor is moved to inactive overnight.
- 0 turns the sweep off. That is how a new account starts.
- Nothing is lost — the record and its history stay exactly as they are.
- Any work at all brings them straight back to active.
Covered properly in When a vendor goes quiet.
What a vendor form asks for
This card does not contain any settings. It tells you where they are: Fields & rules, with every other module.
The reasoning is on the card itself, and it is worth repeating because it explains a lot about how this product is built:
Vendors are not a special case, and a second place to edit them is a second place for them to disagree.
So the fields on a vendor, what each offers, and the rules between them are managed in one place along with leads, customers and everything else. There is a button on the card that takes you there.
What you can change there
- Which fields appear on the vendor form.
- Which are required.
- The options in the lists — your own vendor categories, your own business types.
- Custom fields for whatever your trade needs that we did not think of.
Adding a required field applies to new vendors and to any existing one somebody edits. It does not retrospectively invalidate records that are already saved — but the next person to open an old vendor will have to fill it in before they can save.
Why there are only two
A settings screen per module, each with its own copy of the same twenty switches, is how products become impossible to reason about. Ask “which fields are required on a vendor” and the honest answer becomes “it depends which screen you looked at”.
So the only thing that lives here is the one behaviour that is genuinely about vendors and nothing else — the quiet sweep. Everything about the form lives with every other module’s form.
What is managed elsewhere
| Setting | Where |
|---|---|
| Fields on the vendor form, and which are required | Fields & rules |
| Vendor categories and business types | Fields & rules → lists |
| Who may add, edit, approve or block | Roles & permissions |
| Purchase order and bill numbering | Numbering |
| TDS sections and rates | Taxes |
| What a vendor sees when they sign in | The vendor record, per vendor |
Worth reading once. Half the questions that start “where do I change…” for vendors are answered by that table.
Changing a list in Fields & rules — adding a vendor category, say — applies everywhere immediately. Removing one does not retag the vendors already using it, so remove with care.
A worked decision
A print and packaging business setting the quiet sweep for the first time.
| Consideration | Their situation | Points to |
|---|---|---|
| How often they buy | Weekly from three, occasionally from twenty | Not 90 — the occasional ones would all go quiet. |
| Seasonal suppliers | One packaging supplier used only at Diwali | 365, or that supplier is inactive eleven months a year. |
| What they want to see | “Who do we actually use?” | Any sweep at all beats zero. |
They set 365. On the first night, 140 of their 180 imported vendors move to inactive — which is alarming for a moment and is the first honest picture they have had of how many suppliers the business really has.
Nothing was lost and nothing was blocked. All 140 can still be ordered from. The list simply stopped claiming they were live relationships.
Where to go next
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.