# Vendor Portal The vendor portal is a dedicated space where your vendors — crew members, contractors, service providers — can submit invoices and timecards against work assigned to them, track the status of their submissions, and manage their billing relationship with your organization. It's where PAI closes the loop between what you budgeted and what you actually owe. From your side, the portal replaces the back-and-forth of collecting invoices by email, reconciling amounts manually, and chasing down receipts. Vendors submit against what you've posted, you review and approve, and the payment workflow proceeds from there. --- ## Getting Vendors onto the Portal Before a vendor can access your portal, they go through a short onboarding sequence. For a full overview of the vendor lifecycle — from creating the record to activation — see [Vendors](./Vendors.md). The short version: 1. You send an invitation from the vendor's record or from a budget expense line 2. The vendor registers a PAI account (or connects an existing one) and completes their profile 3. Their status moves to **In Review** — your queue to review and activate them 4. You assign a classification and activate them, granting portal access A vendor account can connect to multiple organizations. If a vendor already has a PAI account from working with another organization, they simply approve the connection request — no new account needed. --- ## What Vendors Can Do in the Portal What a vendor sees in their portal depends on how they've been classified. **1099 and Foreign Individual vendors** submit invoices. Once expenses have been made available for billing, they can view them, create an invoice against them, and upload any required supporting documentation. Their portal shows their full invoice history and payment status for each submission. **W2 vendors** submit timecards. Rather than creating an invoice, they enter hours worked against posted day rates. PAI calculates overtime automatically based on the method set on the expense line — Tiered (California standards), After 8, or None. Their portal shows their timecard history and payment status. **All portal users** can update their own contact information, view payment status, and download copies of documents they've submitted. --- ## Reimbursable Expenses Reimbursable expenses show up differently in the vendor portal than standard billing items. Instead of displaying a billable dollar amount, a reimbursable expense shows as **$0 / [maximum allowance]** — for example, `$0 / $25` for a meal expense. The vendor enters the actual amount spent up to that cap and is required to upload a receipt. PAI prevents submission without an attached receipt, and won't allow billing above the maximum. --- ## Vendor Payment Status After submitting, vendors can track their document's progress through the following states: | Status | What it means | |---|---| | **Submitted** | Received; awaiting your review | | **Approved** | Reviewed and accepted; not yet scheduled for payment | | **Payment Scheduled** | A payment date has been set; vendor is notified | | **Paid** | Payment completed | | **Rejected** | Returned to vendor for revision; rejection reason is communicated | Vendors receive email notifications at each significant status change — approval, rejection, payment scheduling, and payment completion. --- ## Portal Configuration ### Instructions Tab The vendor portal includes an **Instructions** tab visible to vendors after they connect to your organization. Use it to communicate anything vendors need to know before they start billing: your invoicing requirements, documentation standards, payment terms, processing timelines, or any special requirements for international vendors. If you don't add any content, the tab won't appear. Configure this in **Organization Settings → Vendor Portal**. ### Vendor Messaging and Document Requests PAI includes an opt-in messaging feature that lets you communicate with vendors and exchange documents directly from the vendor record — without leaving PAI. You can send messages, share files, and request documents from vendors, who can respond through their portal. Both sides receive email notifications when new messages are pending. You can also create document templates — preset collections of documents to send to vendors as a package, useful for standardizing what you send to new crew at the start of a project. Documents received from vendors through this channel are stored in the vendor record for centralized access and retrieval. To enable this feature, go to **Organization Settings → Vendor Portal** and opt in. > [!note] > Vendor information is never shared between organizations. All billing history, documents, and communications remain private to your organization's relationship with that vendor.