Suppliers & customers
The parties you buy from and sell to — and the ways their records differ.
Suppliers and customers are the two trading parties. They look symmetrical, but Carbon models them through different modules with a few deliberate differences worth knowing.
Suppliers
A supplier lives in purchasing and anchors the buy side — purchase orders, supplier quotes, and bills all reference it. Its status is a fixed set: Active, Inactive, Pending, Rejected. A supplier links to the items you buy through supplier parts, each carrying the supplier's own part number, a minimum order quantity, and a conversion factor from their pack to your stock unit.
A supplier part has no lead time — purchasing lead time is set per item, not per supplier-part. The supplier part is about identity and pack size, not delivery time.
Customers
A customer lives in sales and anchors the sell side — quotes, orders, and invoices reference it. Unlike supplier status, customer status is a configurable list you define, not a fixed enum. Customers don't have a supplier-part analog; pricing instead comes from price overrides and pricing rules, which can target a whole customer type and stack with quantity breaks.
The asymmetry to remember: supplier status is a fixed four-value set; customer status is a company-configurable lookup. Their type catalogs (supplier type, customer type) are both user-defined.
What they share
Both records carry the same satellite shape: contacts, locations/addresses, and payment, shipping, and tax defaults. Payment terms, currency, and tax settings live on those satellites — not on the core record. Both also have a human-readable id (SUP… / CUS…) on top of their internal key, and both can expose an external portal: suppliers respond to RFQs through a digital-quote link; customers track their orders through a customer portal.