Venue Management - Suggested Suppliers

1. Why add a Suggested Supplier?
2. How to add a Suggested Supplier
3. How to Manage & Add Suppliers to your Events?
4. What can Suppliers see & do?
5. Next Steps

Why add a Suggested Supplier?

The suggested Supplier section in Hostology is a useful time saving tool, where you can add external suppliers that you frequently work with to the system - so that they are easily available to add to all events you are running at your venue, and are also visible to your customers.

The Supplier list simplifies the way you manage your suppliers, as you can tag them in categories, leave notes about what you think and manage and view all of their contract and licensing information. 

You can also add suppliers directly into an event, without them needing to be recommended, to see how to do this, go to this article here. You can also always upgrade a supplier to your recommended list if you/your couples loved working with them

How to add a Suggested Supplier

To add a Suggested Supplier to your supplier list, you firstly need to navigate to the Venue management section of your venue, you can do this by clicking on the 'Venues' button then clicking on your venue name:

You can then click on 'Planning' then 'Suppliers' in the navigation on the left-hand side of the page, which will take you to the correct page. Here you can then click 'Add New Supplier' to start adding a new suggested supplier:

Here you will be asked to complete some information about the Supplier, you can fill in as much or as little of the information as you choose (if you are inviting the supplier to join Hostology, they can login and update all their business information instead!):

• Business Name - The Name of the suppliers business (the main one that will appear)
• Contact First & Last Name - The name of the key contact your customers/you can connect with
• Email - the email address for the business you use to contact and connect with (NB - this will need to be a unique login, check out this article here for Supplier information on how Agency's can set up)
• Phone Number - The contact phone number for the Supplier
• Website - The Website landing page or key page to direct customers too for the supplier
• Description - A quick description of what the supplier offers
• Our View - This is your chance to provide an honest evaluation to your customers of the Supplier you are working with. E.g. "They are really quick to respond" or, "These are our preferred caterer for Vegan meals".
• Visibility - "Internal" vs "All", whether your customers can see these suppliers or not (Will appear in the suggested supplier list for your customers if set to "All")
• Services - A drop down list with options for what type of offerings the supplier provides.

Lastly you have two options:

1. Save - This will just add the Supplier to the list, they will not receive an invite to join Hostology. You will therefore be responsible for all information on their account at this point and able to edit
2. Save & Send Invite - This will send the Supplier an email (to the email address added) inviting them to create an account and login to Hostology. They can then add and maintain all their details and documentation. They can also see which events they have been added to and are able to add notes and collaborate.

Once you have added a supplier, they will appear in the list view. You can the also edit your suggested suppliers by clicking the 3 dots next to the supplier you want to edit then click 'Edit'. This feature will not be available if the supplier has logged in and updated their information (as they will now be responsible).

As above, you can also select to "Remove" which means the supplier will be removed from the Suggested list (it won't delete the suppliers account though if they are already on event). 

You can also "Resend link" which is a way to resend the link to invite the supplier to login and use Hostology - in case it has gone into their spam/been lost.

How to manage & add Suppliers to your events?

To add suppliers to events, check out this article here. You can also add suppliers just for events that you don't usually work with or do not recommend. These Suppliers can also be "Upgraded" if you love working with them.

You can also reorder your recommended suppliers by clicking on 'Reorder' and using the icon on the left to move your recommended suppliers into the order that you want. Once you have finished click on 'Set order' to save your new order. 

What can Suppliers see & do?

Check out this article to see exactly what Suppliers can do once they create an account. You can also see the process of how they set up an account here too - just in case!

Next steps

Check out how to create time saving workflows

Check out how to add documents & links to your events