Vendor Tools

IO S. shared this announcement 7 years ago

If you sub-rent items from friends, you can now keep track of them and send automatic availability and and price requests to the vendors.

After a vendor responds you’ll be able to see the availability and cost on that lead. Additionally, vendor items do not count against your rental inventory limit.

New Features:

  • API: v2 is now available with many additional calls to retrieve data
  • Mobile: Our mobile app has been updated to include easy availability checking. See app store for details
  • Vendors: We’ve added the ability to track sub-contracted items better
  • Editor: Upgraded rich text editor for emails and templates
  • Leads: Can now set a default delivery type when creating a new lead (under Settings->Delivery Types)
  • CRM: Leaving a note on a lead now saves with the customer profile (and all leads) by default
  • Filters: You can now share a filter with other workers. If that worker modifies it, it creates a copy for them.
  • Alerts: Added new ‘Lead Canceled with Shifts’ alert. Activate under Settings->Alerts
  • Multi-Location: Can now customize surveys per location

Bugs fixed:

  • Overview: Fixed Maps tab to work properly
  • Leads: Fixed bug where the search drop-down didn’t always disappear
  • ...and many other small things

See history of updates

Comments (7)

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1

Vendor Tools looks like it's going to be a great feature! How do I use it though? I created a new lead to test it, but it hasn't sent an email to my vendor (me) yet.

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The email won't go out until it's been at least 30mins since the lead been last modified (or if there are multiple leads with the same customer).

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The email ended up going out at 5am today, 18 hours after I last modified the lead. Can we speed that up or get an option to send manually? Nobody on my sales team will use that if they have to wait to get a reply. also, does the salesperson get notified in any way that the vendor has responded? I didn't see anything pop up.

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3

I've fixed the issue with it not going out for you on time.

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1

This will be very useful! Is there a variable for vendor that we can add to packing lists?

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2

*vendor_id* - Vendor ID

*vendor_contactname* - Vendor First/Last Name

*vendor_companyname* - Vendor Company Name

*vendor_cell* - Vendor Cell Number

*vendor_office* - Vendor Office Number

*vendor_email* - Vendor Email

*vendor_items* - List of vendor items

*vendor_newquoteurl* - URL for confirming vendor availability and cost

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1

FYI - The *vendor_items* (and newquoteurl) variable can be used anywhere in a template, but the rest of them have to be inside a rental loop to work.

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1

Could you provide some material or training to show us how to set this up and use it properly? Also I set up a vendor in the settings and think it would be helpful to have additional notes section that include billing or mailing address, typical hourly rates and travel charges, website, description of services, etc.

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4

Thank you all for the comments. It's clear that this is going to be a popular feature. We will try to incorporate more of your suggestions for future releases.

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trying to use this vendor tool is fairly frusterating. A typical situation for us is to subcontract face painting or other entertainers and some leads require multiple face painters. I don't understand why I can't identify the rental item "face painter" requires vendors and when I go to add it to a lead, the vendor button appears and I can add one or multiple vendors to the 1 line item in the contract without the customer having to view a messy contract with various seperate line items for each vendor. The current system only works for a 1 to 1 ratio of rental to vendor when often we have multiple vendors for 1 single rental item.

Also didn't receive automated vendor email when I was testing.

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1

Thanks for the feedback Ryan. We are looking at potential issues with the email that is sent out and should have it fixed soon.


Regarding your other issue, I see that after entering an item, the search does not show what vendor that item is from. That was an oversight, and I will correct it. However, it seems like what you are trying to do is send out a request for the one item to many vendors to later determine what vendor you want to choose from. Am I understanding this correctly? We had not thought of doing that, but it's a great idea. I'd like to add that feature for you as soon as we can. If I misunderstood, please correct me. Thanks!

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2

that's one potential scenario, on our website, IO, and quote page we have one general listing for face painter or balloon twister, but behind the scenes we have several different vendors we will call for quotes. However there are events that need 3 face painters for example, we will need to contact and hire 3 different vendors, but it would look pretty weird on the invoice or online if we had Face painter listed 3 times for each different vendor that performs the same task. So you should be able to hire multiple vendors for 1 rental item.

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2

Makes sense. We will update it.

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1

Hi,

this is indeed going to be a great tool especially since I am also starting offering all these things like balloontwisters, hostesses, face painting, shows etc. These are all subcontracted off course.


Just some confusing thing, when the email is sent out to the vendor, the name of the actual client appears in that as well. It looks like they will be responding to the client as well! So they are a bit afraid to click it.

In fact my clients name shouldn't appear anywhere in that communication.

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These are template based, and the template should only have your company name in it. I'm not seeing where the customer would get any of their info filled in.

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