---
title: Vendors and purchase invoices
slug: vendors-and-purchase-invoices
category: Services & Products
url: https://alaga.io/help/article/vendors-and-purchase-invoices
audiences: business_owner
updated: 2026-09-03
source: Alaga Help Center
---

# Vendors and purchase invoices
Sidebar: **Vendors**.

This is the money going out — shampoo, food, bedding, equipment. It is the half of the picture most pet businesses only assemble at year end, when it is too late to act on.

## Vendors

Add each supplier with their contact details. Mark ones you no longer use as inactive rather than deleting them, so past spend stays attributed.

## Purchase invoices

Record supplier invoices against a vendor with the amount, the date, and whether they are pending or paid.

You do not need to itemise every line. The value is in knowing you spent £340 with your food supplier in March, not in reproducing their invoice.

## Spend

The **Invoices & Spend** view totals what you have recorded per vendor. That is the number worth looking at each quarter — it is how you notice that consumables have crept up 30% while your prices have not moved.

## What this is not

- **Not stock control.** Recording a purchase invoice for forty bags of food does not add them to your product inventory. Stock levels are managed under **Products** — see *Products, stock and low-stock alerts*.
- **Not accounts payable.** Marking an invoice paid records that you paid it; it does not pay it, and it does not connect to your bank.
- **Not a substitute for your accounts.** Your accountant still needs the actual invoices. Keep the paperwork.

## Practical advice

- **Record as they arrive.** Ten minutes a week beats a day in January.
- **Be consistent with vendor names.** "Pets at Home", "PAH" and "Pets@Home" as three vendors makes the spend report useless.
- **Include the boring ones** — waste collection, laundry, utilities if you can attribute them. The unglamorous recurring costs are usually where the money goes.
- **Look at spend against revenue quarterly.** Reports gives you what came in; this gives you what went out. Neither is much use alone.