Documentation/ Dashboard and reports/ Top suppliers and items
Your biggest suppliers and most-bought items
Two rankings answer the negotiating questions: who you buy most from and what you buy most of. Both are worked out from delivery notes, and that shapes how they have to be read.
Dashboard › Top 10 suppliers and Top 10 items
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The two rankings
| Ranking | Ordered by | Worked out from |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10 suppliers | Net amount. | Delivery notes. |
| Top 10 items | Quantity bought. | Delivery notes. |
They are shown as bar charts, and each has its own export button to Excel.
Why from delivery notes
The delivery note records what physically came in, with its detail line by line. The invoice groups things together and may arrive weeks later, or cover several delivery notes at once.
To know what is being consumed and in what quantities, the delivery note is the figure closest to the warehouse's reality.
The trade-off: if your company does not process delivery notes, only invoices, both rankings will be empty or incomplete. It is not a fault in the dashboard: there is no data to build them from.
Top 10 suppliers
Ordered by net amount, that is, before VAT. Which is right for comparing suppliers, because the tax is not a cost.
It answers the question of where your buying is concentrated. It is the starting point for any negotiation: the top five usually account for most of the spend.
Top 10 items
Ordered by quantity bought, not by value. It answers what moves most, which does not always match what costs most.
A cheap item bought daily can head this ranking without appearing in the first one. And it is exactly where a small improvement in price has the most cumulative effect.
This ranking's quality depends on the items being merged. The same product under two different descriptions shows up as two items and neither of them reaches the top.
The spreadsheet brings more than the chart
The chart shows ten. The export button downloads the complete list, with no such limit.
It is the difference that makes the export useful: for negotiating, the first ten are not enough, you need to see where the long tail is and which suppliers compete on the same items.
The export respects the date range and project filtered. If no dates are selected, nothing is generated: the range is required for these downloads.
What they are really for
- Preparing a negotiation. Turning up knowing how much you buy from that supplier and what weight they carry in the total.
- Spotting concentration. If one supplier accounts for too much, there is a supply risk worth measuring.
- Choosing where to watch the price. The fastest-moving items are where a rise goes most unnoticed and costs most.
- Comparing periods. Changing the date range and seeing what has moved in the ranking says more than the absolute figure.
The biases worth knowing about
| Bias | Effect |
|---|---|
| Unpriced delivery notes | The supplier appears lower than they should. |
| Duplicate items in the master | Consumption is split and neither stands out. |
| Duplicate suppliers | The same thing, at supplier level. |
| Different units for the same item | The quantities are not comparable with each other. |
| Purchases with no delivery note | They appear in neither ranking. |
The first three are settled by maintaining the masters: merging duplicates and fixing units. It is work done once that improves every report at the same time.
Things that come up
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The rankings come out empty | Delivery notes are not processed, or there are none in the period. | Widen the range. If delivery notes are not used, these rankings do not apply. |
| A supplier you know is big is missing | Their delivery notes arrive unpriced. | Check it on that supplier's delivery note list. |
| An item appears twice under similar names | It is duplicated in the master. | Merge it from the product master. |
| The export does not download | One of the filter's two dates is missing. | Give the full range. |
| The spreadsheet has more rows than expected | It brings the complete list, not just the top ten. | That is how it is meant to work and usually what you need. |