For new transactions and expenses, Expend looks for the supplier’s name in a list of known suppliers. We call this “supplier matching”. This solves the common problem of having multiple names for what is actually the same supplier. For example, the data captured from card transactions sometimes has different names for the same supplier (such as AMAZON.CO.UK, Amazon UK Marketplace, Amazon EU, AMAZON UK RETAIL), but expenses can be assigned the same supplier name in all these cases – simply “Amazon”.

If you use an accounting integration such as Xero or QuickBooks, the expense will sync using this supplier name. For Xero, this stops it from creating a new contact for each variation of the name.

Users with the Administrator role can manage the organisation’s suppliers in the Expend web app. To manage suppliers, open the menu on the left and select Settings > Suppliers.

There are two lists:

This list contains suppliers used by your organisation, including suppliers added manually by you or other users, and those added from the Expend Catalogue. These suppliers take priority when Expend does matching for expenses.

An archived supplier will no longer be available for selection by Expend or users. This might be useful if a supplier has been entered incorrectly or if there are multiple names for the same supplier. Note that existing expenses will keep the archived supplier name unless you update them. The supplier will simply no longer be available for new expenses. To archive a supplier, click the Archive button.

The Expend Catalogue is a shared list of suppliers used to match expense supplier names. Search it before adding a supplier to avoid duplicates and improve matching accuracy.

To add a supplier from the Expend Catalogue to the Your suppliers list, simply click the Add to your suppliers button. It will now be given priority when Expend matches suppliers.