Potential Suppliers

The Potential Supplier feature captures and tracks companies that begin engaging with a buyer organization but have not yet been fully onboarded or converted into current suppliers. It serves as the system’s early-stage supplier intake layer, ensuring that every registration initiated through a buyer’s portal is recorded, structured, and available for reporting, search, and follow-up. This provides organizations with visibility into supplier interest before formal approval or onboarding is completed, reducing the risk of losing prospective vendors during the intake process.

From the supplier perspective, a company can access a buyer’s supplier portal and complete a registration process to express interest in doing business with the organization. During registration, the supplier submits core company details such as business information, demographics, and a summary of products and services capabilities. This information is stored in SupplierGateway as a Potential Supplier record. Once submitted, the supplier becomes visible in potential supplier datasets, allowing administrators and procurement teams to identify new entrants, evaluate interest trends, and include them in supplier pipeline reporting. Depending on configuration, these suppliers may later be invited to complete additional onboarding steps or be converted into fully approved suppliers.

From the administrative perspective, Potential Supplier data is managed through a dedicated reporting dashboard. To access it, navigate to System Settings > Supplier Management > Potential Suppliers. This area provides a centralized view of all suppliers who have completed registration through a buyer portal and are currently classified as potential suppliers. The dashboard is designed to support both quick visibility and deeper reporting analysis, allowing administrators to understand how many new suppliers have entered the system over a selected time period and to review supporting detail when needed.

Within the dashboard, administrators can enter a specific date range and select Submit to refresh results. The system will update the view to reflect all Potential Supplier registrations captured during that time window, providing a total count of suppliers added within the selected range. This allows organizations to track supplier engagement trends over time, monitor spikes in registration activity, and measure pipeline growth.

For deeper analysis, administrators can download a detailed report directly from the dashboard. The exported file includes supplier name, demographic information, and a summary of products and services capabilities for each Potential Supplier record. This data supports downstream activities such as supplier qualification review, category alignment, and onboarding prioritization. To identify newly added suppliers quickly, users can sort the exported Excel file by date, which surfaces the most recent registrations at the top of the dataset.

Together, the dashboard and reporting capabilities ensure that supplier registrations are not only captured but also actionable. Organizations gain a consistent, reportable view of early-stage supplier engagement, enabling better visibility into pipeline development, improved onboarding coordination, and more effective supplier lifecycle management within SupplierGateway.

Step by Step guide to generating a Potential Supplier Report