Now that you have provided the VendorLink environment with data, it's time to create categories.
To bundle Spend into well-organised groups, in addition to the financial dimensions, VendorLink makes use of so-called categories.
These categories can be linked to cost centres or suppliers, which automatically allocates the spend to the correct category.
Uploaded data in VendorLink will be divided into these categories, based on the supplier or cost category. You can see all spend categories in Spend > Categories.
Creating a category
- Navigate to Admin > Tables > Categories.
Here you will find an overview with all categories and subcategories, in this case there will be nothing in the overview because no categories exist yet. - To create a new category, click 'Add'.
- A form opens, leave the 'Parent' field empty as there is no category yet to be designated as the main category.
Fill in a reference code, description, status, indicate whether the spend in this category can be influenced, the risk factor, the influence factor on the result and finally indicate whether you want to be able to view the compliance of this category per supplier (this only has to do with policy compliance). Read more about adding categories here.
The category is now created and visible in the overview, and under Spend > Categories when you have linked Spend data to the category.
Create all desired categories in this way, and use subcategories whenever possible (for a subcategory, enter the field 'parent' when creating, this is the parent category).