# Vendors Every external person or company you spend money on in PAI is a vendor — freelancers, contractors, rental houses, and service providers. Full-time employees on your organization's payroll are not vendors in PAI. The Vendors module is where you manage these relationships — a centralized database of records that connects to your budgets, call sheets, and, optionally, the vendor billing portal. You don't need to use PAI's vendor portal to get value from vendor records. Even without portal billing, having vendors in the system means your budget expense lines are attributed to real people and companies, your call sheets populate with their contact details automatically, and you have a searchable record of who you've worked with and what you've spent with them across projects. The portal adds a layer on top of that — but the CRM stands on its own. --- ## Vendor Types When creating a vendor record, you choose between two types: **Individual** — identified primarily by first and last name. Use this for people: crew members, sole proprietors, independent contractors, anyone you'd refer to by name. This is also the type to use if you plan to have the vendor bill through the PAI portal, since portal billing requires an email address and is person-centric. **Business / Merchant** — identified primarily by business name. Use this for companies, rental houses, retailers, location services, and other service providers you typically pay externally rather than through PAI. A business name is the only required field; email and contact details are optional. The type you choose has a practical downstream effect: only Individual vendors can be fully activated for portal billing. Merchant-type vendors are for internal tracking — expense attribution, reporting, call sheet contacts — but they don't receive invoices through PAI. --- ## Adding Vendors Vendors can be added in two places: **From the Vendors module** — navigate to **Vendors** in the main nav, click **Add Vendor**, and complete the profile. You can optionally send a portal invitation at this point. **From a budget expense line** — click into the vendor field on any expense line, search for an existing vendor, or select **Add New Vendor** to create one inline. You'll be prompted for the minimum required fields and can choose to send a portal invitation or just create the record. Both paths create the same vendor record — the budget route is simply a faster path when you're already working in the budget and realize a vendor doesn't exist yet. --- ## Vendor Profiles A vendor's profile contains the information PAI uses throughout the system: - **Contact details** — name, email, phone; used in call sheets and portal communications - **Address** — enables distance-based search in Crew Finder - **Position / specialty** — categorizes the vendor by role; used for filtering in Crew Finder - **Business name** — for individuals with a business entity, or the primary identifier for Merchant-type vendors If a vendor has registered through the portal and connected to your organization, some profile fields become read-only on your side — the vendor owns that information and manages it through their portal account. --- ## Connecting Vendors to the Portal Vendors go through a short lifecycle before they can access your organization's billing portal: **Invitation** — you send an invite from either the vendor record or a budget expense line. The vendor receives an email prompting them to register or log in if they already have a PAI account. **Registration** — the vendor creates a PAI account (or connects an existing one), completes their profile, and establishes a connection to your organization. A single vendor account can connect to multiple organizations. **In Review** — once the vendor completes registration, their status moves to In Review. This is your queue to review their information and activate them. **Activation** — before activating, you must assign a vendor classification: | Classification | What it means | |---|---| | **1099** | Independent contractor — billed via invoice through the portal | | **W2** | Employee — billed via timecard through the portal | | **Foreign Individual** | Non-US contractor — billed via invoice through the portal | | **Merchant** | Business / retailer — internal tracking only, no portal billing | Classification in PAI determines how the vendor interacts with the billing system. It is not a legal determination — consult your legal and financial advisors for proper worker classification. Once classified and activated, the vendor gains access to their billing dashboard within your organization's portal. > [!note] > Vendor information is never shared between organizations. Each organization maintains its own private relationship with every vendor, even if that vendor is connected to multiple organizations. --- ## Crew Finder The Crew Finder is a map-based search tool for locating vendors in your database by geographic proximity and role. It's useful during pre-production when you're staffing a project in a location you don't usually work in, or when you want to surface crew members who haven't been top-of-mind. **How to search:** - Enter an address or city to center the map on a production location - Set a search radius using the preset distance options or enter a custom value - Filter by role or specialty — you can enter multiple roles simultaneously (e.g., "Gaffer, Key Grip") and the map will show vendors who match either Results appear as markers on the map. The search checks both primary and secondary roles that vendors have listed in their profiles, so a vendor who listed camera operator as a secondary role will still surface in a camera operator search. Crew Finder only shows vendors already in your organization's database — it's a tool for working with your existing network, not a public crew directory.