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What is a Vendor?

A vendor in Smartbills represents a merchant, supplier, or business from which your organization makes purchases. Vendors are automatically detected when receipts are processed through OCR, or they can be created manually. Maintaining a clean vendor directory helps ensure consistent categorization, accurate reporting, and reliable vendor-level spending analysis. Vendors are managed from the Vendors page.

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How It Works

1

Detection

When a new expense is created from a receipt, Smartbills uses OCR to extract the vendor name. The system checks the extracted name against your existing vendor directory to find a match.
2

Matching

If the vendor name matches an existing entry (accounting for minor spelling variations and abbreviations), the expense is automatically linked to that vendor. The vendor’s default category and other saved settings are applied to the expense.
3

Creation

If no match is found, Smartbills creates a new vendor entry in your directory with the extracted name. An admin or accountant can later enrich the vendor record with additional details like tax ID, address, and default category.
4

Ongoing Management

Over time, your vendor directory grows into a comprehensive record of all businesses your organization transacts with. You can merge duplicates, update vendor details, and use vendor data for spending analysis.

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Auto-Detected vs. Manually Created Vendors

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Vendor Fields

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Vendor Matching for Incoming Expenses

When a new expense arrives, Smartbills uses vendor matching to link it to the correct vendor record. The matching process handles common variations:
  • Abbreviations: “Tim Hortons” matches “Tim Horton’s” and “Tim Hortons #1234”
  • Location suffixes: “Staples - Store 456” matches the main “Staples” vendor record
  • Minor spelling differences: Fuzzy matching handles OCR artifacts and slight misspellings
  • Manual override: If the automatic match is incorrect, the user can reassign the vendor
When a vendor is matched, its default category is applied to the expense. This saves time and ensures consistency, if all purchases from a given office supply store should be categorized as “Office Supplies,” setting the default category on the vendor record handles this automatically.

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Key Terminology

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Roles Involved

Create a Vendor

How to manually create a new vendor record

Manage Vendors

Edit, merge, and organize your vendor directory

Categories

Set default categories for vendor expenses

Expenses

Understand how expenses are linked to vendors