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What is the difference between a Vendor and a Subcontractor in Business Central?

Subcontractors
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Presenter: Sune Lohse, Chief Strategy Officer

How to differentiate between subcontractors and vendors in Business Central?

In Business Central, most of our customers are aware of the term vendor.
But some people also find the term subcontractor in the system, so I’ll just explain the difference from a vendor and a subcontractor.

This is what happens in the video

If you’re going into a work center in Business Central, I’ll just take my Paint department here,
because I know in this scenario, it’s set up as a subcontractor, meaning it has a Subcontractor No. field in my posting tab, and you can select the vendor in this field.

So, this is set up as a subcontractor, the painting guy that we’re using, and you might also have seen a subcontracting work sheet that looks like this, and it’s used to calculate all the subcontracting jobs you need to do, and to carry out purchase orders as subcontracting orders.

So, what is actually the difference?

Basically, the difference is that a vendor is somebody who sells us an item, meaning we’re buying an item that we put in stock, and we buy it from a purchase order as the type item and store it in our inventory, and it adds to our item ledger entry.

Whereas a subcontractor is a vendor that is performing a job for us, so he’s doing an operation in a routing, for instance, like in my example before; a painter that is painting stuff for us.

So, we’re not buying paint, we’re buying the operation of painting, and we need to, or we like to be able to control that in our system.

So, subcontractors are also handled by purchase orders in Business Central, and on the operation on the production order routing.

So, it’s a little more complex than the normal item handling on purchase orders.

And we have other videos to explain how you can work with the subcontractors.

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