Manage your suppliers and vendor relationships
Add and manage suppliers
Each vendor gets a reference (VEN-1, etc.).
Categorize by specialty for quick lookup.
Associate vendors with parts
Link vendors to parts they supply for streamlined procurement.
Preferred vendors auto-suggest during PO creation.
Manage vendor contacts
Keep vendor contact details current for your team.
If a supplier gives you a different account number for each site or department, record them on the vendor page. You can then choose which account a purchase order should be billed to.
Review contacts quarterly — outdated info causes procurement delays.
Track reliability
Monitor delivery times, accuracy, and responsiveness.
Each vendor moves through an approval lifecycle, separate from its active/inactive status. Submitting for approval requires vendor edit rights; approving, rejecting, or suspending requires the vendor approval permission.
Record periodic evaluations rating each vendor on quality, cost, schedule compliance, and communication (1–5). The overall score is the average of the four axes, and the vendor's running average rating appears on its detail page.
Set a re-qualification date when approving a vendor — FreeMaint sends a reminder 30, 15, and 7 days before it expires.
Review performance annually. Consolidate with top-performing vendors.
The scorecard also shows metrics calculated automatically from the vendor's completed work orders — on-time completion rate, number of completed work orders, total cost and average completion time — so performance is tied to real work execution. Quality and communication stay manual ratings, as they require human judgement.
Track vendor spending
Track all costs per vendor across POs and work order additional costs.
Compare vendor spending in Reports to find savings opportunities.
Service agreements, covered equipment and contract files
A contract records a service agreement with one of your vendors: its term, its value, the visits it entitles you to, and the equipment it covers. Contracts live under a vendor — open the vendor, then the Contracts tab.
On the contract form, 'Covered assets' lets you list the equipment the agreement applies to. Each covered machine then shows the contract on its own page, under 'Contracts covering this asset' — so the question 'is this pump still under contract?' is answerable from the equipment, not only from the vendor. Coverage is edited on the contract; the asset page shows it read-only.
A contract has a Documents tab: the signed agreement, annexes, a certificate of insurance. Give each file an expiry date and FreeMaint warns you before it lapses, rather than after — the same reminder mechanism the rest of the document library uses. A file can also be attached to several records at once, so one insurance certificate can cover a contract and a work permit without being uploaded twice.
Set the end date and the notice period when you create the contract. FreeMaint then reminds you while there is still time to renegotiate.
Which vendors service which of your sites
Link a vendor to the locations it services, then find in one click which vendors serve a given site.
On the vendors list, filter by location: you get the vendors linked to that location or to one of its parents; tick « Include sub-locations » to add those linked anywhere below it. On the location page, the « Vendors » tab lists the vendors that serve it, those inherited from a parent, and those linked to its assets. When you choose a vendor on a work order, the ones serving its location come first.
The vendor export has a « Locations Served » column (« Seattle > House 3; Portland »), which the import reads back: separate locations with ;, use the « A > B » path when two locations share a name, write NONE to remove all links. A blank cell leaves the links unchanged.
A vendor linked to « Seattle » serves every location under Seattle: each house shows it as « via Seattle ». Link a vendor to a single house to say that it serves only that house.
Open the vendor and click Edit. In the « Locations served » card, pick one or more locations (search, or browse the hierarchy), then save. Linking requires the permission to edit vendors and to read locations.
Link at the highest level that is true: a vendor serving a whole city is linked to the city, not to each house — new houses are then covered automatically.
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