Invoice generated for inactive vendors

[awoade]

We are trying to clean up our vendor record by inactivating duplicate vendors.  I have users who are still able to make invoices for these inactive vendors, I believe through copying prior invoices.

Is there a way I can disallow employees from using these inactive vendors?  Is there an audit rule I can set which would capture inactive vendors as a flag for approvers to correct?

[KevinD]

@awoade there aren't audit rule conditions to prevent users from selecting an inactive vendor. I did some looking around in your site and I looked at one vendor as an example. I found that this vendor was listed twice under the Inactive Vendors and once under Active. However, I did click on an inactive vendor and the system did allow me to start the process of creating an Invoice for that vendor, which seems odd to me. Let me do some asking around. 

One crazy thought I had is if it is a duplicate, I wonder if the system somehow creates the invoice using the active vendor. I don't know. Just thinking outside the box a bit. 

[KevinD · Accepted solution]

@awoade according to our knowledge base, inactive vendors should not allowed to be selected. 

I just did a test in your site with an invoice for an inactive vendor and here is what happened. I tried to use the Copy button and received this error. 

I'm guessing your users are actually choosing the duplicate that is the active vendor. 

[PoojaKumatkar]

Hi @awoade ,

What Kevin has confirmed is correct. I also tried creating an invoice using the “copy” function, and the system displayed a pop-up window, as shown in the screenshot shared by Kevin.

This is a limitation of the Invoice module—you can’t create an audit rule for inactive vendors because there isn’t a standard field available in the vendor form to support it.

However, you can consider the following workaround:

1. Add a custom list field in the vendor form named “Active (Y) / Inactive (N)”.
2. Set the default value to Y for all active vendors.
3. For inactive vendors, download the list from the Vendor Manager UI and update the field value to "N".
4. Create an audit rule to check if “Active (Y) / Inactive (N)” = N; if the condition is met, trigger a hard stop message.

Note - With this setup, even if an employee creates an invoice using an inactive vendor, the audit rule will prevent them from submitting the invoice.

Update flag as "N" in vendor form either manually or through import.

First download vendors from UI, populate "N" in custom field and upload again.

Testing Screenshot:

Hope this helps! 🙂

If this answers your query, then please mark solution as accepted.