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: , , 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 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: , orders, and 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 through a digital-quote link; customers track their orders through a customer portal.