Using Vendor Center for Editorials
The Vendor Center can be a great tool for when you outsource editorial work to writers or photographers. Your vendor contacts can use their Vendor Center to manage their editorial assignments through the whole process – from accepting or rejecting an editorial, to submitting an invoice for their work.
Registering a New Writer or Photographer
There are two ways that a vendor contact can be created in the system. One is by manually creating a vendor and a vendor contact inside of the system. For instructions on how to create a new vendor contact from within the system, click here. Alternatively, a vendor contact can register through the Vendor Center. By navigating to your Vendor Center, and clicking the ‘Register’ link, the vendor contact will be brought to a registration form where they will need to enter a username and password, as well as their associated company and contact information.
An email notification of the new registration will be sent to the email address in the Address Change/Vendor Request Email system configuration. The email will state who registered, and will provide a link to view the new registration in your system.
The vendor contact who registered will also receive an email notification that their registration was submitted successfully, and that they will receive a second email when their registration is approved and they can begin using the Vendor Center.
To view pending vendor registration requests, either use the link in the notification email, or go to Contacts > Vendors, and click on View New Registrations. The Vendor Account Registration page shows all pending requests. You will see the vendor contact’s name and email, the associated vendor, and when the request was submitted. By using the ellipsis icons in the table, you can either create a new vendor for the contact, assign the contact to an existing vendor, or delete the registration
Tip
You can streamline the process for vendor acceptance by removing the requirement for an EIN or Physical Address when accepting a registration. Both requirements can be disabled in system configurations.
Require EIN/Tax ID For All VendorsYou can choose whether or not you have to enter a EIN/Tax Id number when creating a new vendor. The default is to require the information for any vendor.
Require address for every VendorBy default, all new Vendors require an address. You can disable the Address requirement by setting the configuration to No. Not requiring an address will make it easier to add new Vendors to your system.
Once you have a writer or photographer vendor contact created in your system, you can assign them an editorial.
Go to Production > Editorials to create a new editorial assignment. All editorials must have a title, publication, and be for at least one issue.
Under the Assignments section, you can choose a Vendor Contact for the photographer and writer.
Note
Vendor Contacts are not required for editorials, you only need to assign one if you plan to use an outside freelancer to help with the work.
Once you choose a Vendor Contact, you will be able to set a budget for their work and generate an agreement. For more information about vendor agreements, click here.
If you set a budget to generate a Purchase Order for your vendor contact, you will also need to choose a PO template.
Important
Don’t fill in the budget amount if you don’t plan to use the PO system or issue budget restriction. You can still assign work to vendors without the POs in the system. If you leave the field blank, the system will not create any purchase orders.
Editorial Assignments in the Vendor Center
When you save your editorial, an email notification will be sent to the Vendor Contact(s), that they have been assigned as a writer or photographer for an editorial. In the email, there will also be a link to confirm or decline the assignment in their Vendor Center.
On the Vendor Center home page, your Vendor Contacts will see an ‘Editorials’ icon, as well as an Editorials link on the left-hand menu. By clicking on either of these, they will be brought to the Editorial search page, where they can view all of their pending, approved, amended, and rejected editorial assignments. They can filter the search page by status (for example to find all of their editorial assignments that need approval), or by due date.
By clicking on the title, your Vendor Contacts will can see additional editorial details such as build size and category.
On the search page, they can use the ellipsis icons to perform certain actions on each assignment. For pending editorial assignments, the ellipsis will show an option to approve or reject the assignment. For pending assignments that have agreements, there will be additional links to view and sign the agreement.
Whether your Vendor Contact approves or rejects the assignment, you will receive an email notification with a link to view the editorial in the system.
On the Vendor Center home page, there is also a tile that shows up if the vendor contact has any upcoming editorials. The criteria for an ‘upcoming editorial’ are that they have accepted the editorial assignment, and its due date is within 30 days from the current date. This feature helps your vendor contacts easily keep track of their assignments.
Once a Vendor Contact approves an editorial assignment, they can begin uploading files to the editorial through their Vendor Center. When viewing an editorial, there will be an ‘Upload Content’ button that allows them to upload files that will be shared with your team. They will see all of the files they uploaded to the editorial with an option to view the file in a new tab or download it. Any files uploaded by your Vendor Contacts will automatically show up on your editorial ticket in the system.
When the files show up on the ticket, they can be marked as final, like any other uploaded file, which will close the ticket.
You can also enable a system configuration so that users and Vendor Contacts receive reminder emails when an editorial due date is approaching. Go to Settings > System Configurations – Production, and set ‘Enable Editorial Due Date Reminder’ to yes. When this setting is on, you will also want to enter a value in the ‘Editorial Due Date Reminder Days’ configuration. The reminder days setting is how many days prior to the editorial due date that the email reminder will be sent.
When you are sending editorial reminder emails, you will also want to review your email template to make sure it is up to date. Navigate to Settings > Templates > System Emails and edit the ‘Notification of due date for editor, photographer, and writer’ email subtemplates. As with all our email templates, you can use the custom tags to customize the email that your users and Vendor Contacts receive.
Purchase Orders
If you set a budget for your vendor contact when you created your editorial, then a PO gets automatically created in the system for the vendor contact’s assignment. For more information about PO’s, click here.
In the Vendor Center, your vendor contacts can use the tile on their home page, or the left-hand menu to navigate to the Purchase Orders page, which shows all of their POs in a table format. They can filter by status, including awaiting approval, invoiced, canceled, etc., and date ranges.
The ellipsis icon on each PO allows the vendor contact to perform a handful of actions, including viewing or approving the PO, and creating an invoice for it. When viewing a PO, they can see additional information including the line item details.
Once the editorial assignment is completed, you can mark the PO as work received.
Vendor Invoices
When it comes time to pay your vendor contacts for their work, you can either record a new invoice in the system for them, or they can generate an invoice from their Vendor Center that you can approve and pay.
Record Invoice
If you need to create a record of an invoice for your vendor contact, go to Payables > Record Invoice.
Enter the Vendor, PO Number, Invoice Number, and Invoice Date and Due Date. Once you choose the PO, you will see the original value of the PO, as well as the names and values of the PO’s line items. To record an invoice, select which line items you would like to create an invoice for, the quantity, and sub-total.
Now that all the invoice information has been entered, the last step is to upload the invoice PDF. You can also choose to enter notes if you wish. Click Record Invoice when you are finished.
Vendor Submitted Invoices
Alternatively, your Vendor Contacts can record invoices from their Vendor Centers, which you can then approve. In the Vendor Center, when viewing a specific PO, your Vendor Contacts will see a ‘Create New Invoice’ button.
This button will redirect the contact to a new page where they can upload their invoice, and it will show up for your approval in the system. On the upload invoice page, they will be required to enter the invoice number, amount, and due date. They will also need to upload a pdf of the invoice, and can choose to enter a note.
When a Vendor Contact uploads an invoice through their Vendor Center, you can review the invoice by navigating to Payables > Vendor Submitted Invoices. This page shows a table of all the vendor submitted invoices waiting for approval. Clicking on the invoice number will open the invoice PDF uploaded by the vendor. By using the ellipsis you can either record or reject the invoice.
The Publication Metrics Report can serve as a good reference point to keep track of your editorial expenses. The report breaks its data down into two tables: one for goals, and one for actual statistics.
The goal table includes information for your editorial budget goal for the month, as well as your Ad to Edit % goal.
The ‘actual’ table shows up to date information about your publication statistics, including data about your editorials. You will see the actual number of editorial pages scheduled for each month of the publication, based on the build sizes set on your editorials. You will also see your current Ad to Edit %, as well as totals for your writer and photographer budgets, allowing you to easily compare how your actual amounts are comparing to your goals.