Supplier portal#

The Supplier Portal is a separate interface that your suppliers use to view enquiries and submit quotations. Suppliers access it through a link in the RFQ email — no account registration or password is needed.

How suppliers access the portal#

When you release an RFQ, each invited supplier receives an email containing a unique link. Clicking this link verifies their identity and takes them into the portal:

• If the enquiry is still open for them to quote, the link lands on that specific enquiry so they can fill in their rates.
• If the enquiry has since been closed (or the deadline has passed, or it was superseded by a revised RFQ), the link instead lands on their enquiries list — the closed enquiry is still there to open and review in read-only form, along with everything else you've sent them.

The link never stops working. Even long after the enquiry is closed, the supplier can click it any time to log back in and look through their enquiry history. What the link controls is access to the portal — whether they can still submit a quotation is governed separately by the enquiry's status and closing date.

The supplier's session is maintained via a secure cookie, so they can navigate the portal without re-clicking the email link each time — until the session expires.

Company-wide view, person-level responses#

A supplier company can have several contact people (you create these on the supplier's record). The portal treats them as one team:

• Everything is visible to everyone at the supplier. Whichever contact person logs in sees the whole company's dashboard, enquiries, and orders — not just the items addressed to them personally. So if one colleague is away, another can still open the enquiry and see exactly what was sent and what's pending.
• But only the contact an enquiry was sent to can respond to it. Filling, saving a draft, submitting, or revising a quotation is restricted to that specific person. Everyone else gets a full read-only view — they can open the enquiry, read the draft-in-progress, and see attachments, but the response controls are replaced with a note explaining who it was sent to.

Where the supplier has more than one contact person, the Enquiries and Orders lists add a Contact Person column and a matching filter so you can see, and narrow down by, who each enquiry/order was for. With a single contact person the column and filter are hidden (there's nothing to distinguish).

What the supplier sees#

Dashboard#

A company-wide overview for the whole supplier — totals, win rate, average response time, open drafts, order-value trend, pending deliveries, and top products are aggregated across all of the supplier's contact people, not just the person viewing. The greeting still shows the logged-in contact's name and company.

Enquiries list#

A table of all enquiries sent to this supplier (across every contact person). Each row shows the event status, the supplier's status (invited, quoted, etc.), products, quantities, closing date, the submission timestamp, and — when the supplier has multiple contacts — the Contact Person the enquiry was addressed to. Clicking View opens the enquiry detail.

The list loads 10 enquiries at a time — as the supplier scrolls to the bottom, the next batch appears automatically (with a small loading spinner while it fetches). The header count shows how many are currently loaded; a trailing "+" indicates more are available on the server.

Filters and sort apply server-side, so they always reflect the supplier's full history rather than just what's been scrolled into view:

• Product — substring match on product code or product head name (debounced).
• Event Status — Released / Quoted / Awarded / Closed.
• Your Status — Invited / Emailed / Quoted / No Bid.
• Contact Person — shown only when the supplier has more than one contact; narrows to enquiries addressed to that person.
• Sort by — Received (newest / oldest) or Closing Date (latest / earliest).

Any filter change resets the list to page one and refetches.

Enquiry detail#

Shows enquiry information (closing date, items count, status), the supplier's own company details, and — in the Attention block — the contact person the enquiry was addressed to. Below that, the line items they were asked to quote on — product name, make, and quantity.

If a quotation has already been submitted, it appears as a read-only summary with the rates table.

If the person viewing is not the contact the enquiry was sent to, a read-only notice appears (e.g. "This enquiry was sent to Mr Sharma. You can view it, but only they can respond.") and the response buttons are hidden. They can still see the line items, any saved draft, the submitted quotation, and attachments.

Fill quotation#

Only the contact the enquiry was addressed to can open this. They click Fill Quotation (or Continue Draft / Revise Quotation) to enter rates in a card-based layout — one card per product showing:

• Product name with a tooltip for HSN code, category, and description
• Make and quantity as chips
• Rate, Tax %, Discount %, and a calculated Net Rate
• A remarks field and a No Bid checkbox

At the top, overall fields: Currency, Delivery days, Validity days, and Payment terms. At the bottom, an Additional Notes text area.

Two actions are available:

• Save Draft — saves progress without submitting. The supplier can return later to continue.
• Submit Quotation — a confirmation dialog appears, then the quotation is sent and the draft is deleted.

Orders#

A list of every purchase order the firm has dispatched to this supplier (across all of the supplier's contact people). Drafts and cancelled POs are hidden — the supplier only ever sees POs that were actually sent. When the supplier has multiple contacts, a Contact Person column shows who each order was addressed to.

The status shown here is the delivery state, not the PO lifecycle:

• Pending Delivery — PO was sent, nothing has arrived yet
• Partially Delivered — at least one item's quantity has been (partially) received at the firm's warehouse
• Delivered — every item's full quantity has been received

Delivery state is auto-derived by the firm's inventory team approving stock arrivals against the PO; the supplier sees the result, never the underlying approvals.

Same infinite-scroll behaviour as the Enquiries list — 10 rows per page, spinner at the bottom when more are loading. Filters and sort all apply server-side:

• Product — substring match on product code or product head name (debounced).
• Delivery Status — Pending / Partial / Delivered.
• Contact Person — shown only when the supplier has more than one contact; narrows to orders addressed to that person.
• Sort by — PO Date newest or oldest.

Clicking View opens the order detail page — supplier company info, the firm's PO header (PO number with revision badge, PO date, your quotation reference if any, offer date if any), the contact person it was sent to, the line items (product, qty, price, discount %, tax %, line total), any additional charges, and a totals card (subtotal, total discount, total tax, additional charges, grand total). Notes from the firm appear at the bottom if any were added.

The detail page deliberately omits Created By, Created At, and a literal "Status: sent" line — the delivery chip in the top-right of the detail page already conveys the visible state, and the rest is internal to the firm.

Profile#

A read-only view of the supplier's company information and contact person details.

Draft behaviour#

When a supplier saves a draft:

• They see a Continue Draft button on the enquiry detail page instead of Fill Quotation.
• On the staff side (Vendor detail page), the Fill Quotation action is disabled with a tooltip: "Supplier has a saved draft on the portal". This prevents staff from overwriting the supplier's in-progress work.
• Once the supplier submits their quotation, the draft is automatically deleted.

Session expiry#

If the supplier's session expires, they see a message asking them to use the link from their original email to access the portal again. That original link still works indefinitely — re-clicking it simply starts a fresh session and drops them on the relevant enquiry (or, if it's now closed, on their enquiries list).

Old email links#

If a supplier clicks a link from an email sent before the portal was introduced (/quotation-fill?token=...), they are automatically redirected to the new Supplier Portal.