Inventory Management > International Vendors

[GGH210]

Observation

We recently upgraded to the SFR Plus version to take advantage of the Inventory Management module. One of the first step we performed was to upload the vendor file. While importing our vendors, we received error messages for INVALID state and phone number.

Limitations

It appears the design assumes that all vendors (e.g., wholesalers) are located in the USA. However, vendors can be located just about anywhere in the world. In fact, approximately 80% of our vendors are international.

So, why does the validation prevent us from adding the international contact information for our vendors? As a result of this restriction, we can only upload limited information and must track all of the remaining contact data in a spreadsheet.

Recommendation

After risk assessing this data, the strict validation on a vendor file is unnecessary. While it may have been intended to catch a few data entry errors, the implementation of this validation is more disruptive than imagined.

It would be best to remove the strict validations for vendor addresses and phone numbers so we can add this information to the vendor list. The data fields should be freeform text (alphanumeric) fields and the process should allow us to enter our international vendor's contact details.

[MayaP]

Hello @GGH210 this is a great callout, thank you for resurfacing this!

I did reach out to our team and they are currently tracking this request but there are no plans right now to have the option to add international vendors. I do understand it is incredibly limiting and overall is just very frustrating. Once more information becomes available from our Product Team, a Community moderator will update the status to the next phase. Keep an eye out for the email once this change has been made. 

Thank you again for your input! 

[Horsefeathers]

We have the same requirement. The majority of our vendors are outside the United States; I asked Square about this years ago and was given the same answer. Why isn't Square working on this? Square keeps saying you're not just for small one-person businesses, but we keep running into shortcomings like this which lead us to believe we're too large for Square. It's not a weird request.