Requires the following role: Owner
Overview
Tropic integrates with your ERP system to sync vendor and spend data, providing clear visibility into actual spending across suppliers. To ensure accuracy, it’s essential to match your ERP vendors to suppliers within Tropic.
Tropic’s Supplier Mapping helps you quickly align most of your ERP vendors with Tropic suppliers using AI to suggest high-confidence matches.
What is Supplier Mapping?
Tropic’s Supplier mapping page provides you the ability to establish a connection between ERP vendor data, with all its underlying spend to the correct Tropic suppliers, so that you can accurately report actual spend data.
Prerequisites
To match suppliers, you must be integrated with one of the following Accounting Systems:
Recommended Sequence of Steps
Start with Supplier Matching
We recommend starting with Supplier Matching to quickly align the majority of your ERP vendors with Tropic suppliers.
Begin by navigating to Integration –> Data Matching --> Suppliers tab, where Tropic’s AI will automatically handle high-confidence matches, aligning them with suppliers in Tropic’s global database. Sorting, filtering, and bulk actions are available to help you efficiently manage any ERP vendors not matched by AI.
For more granular control, you can use the filter options to target low- or medium-confidence matches, pending matches, or specific suppliers based on spend or other criteria. The filters help you quickly zero in on items that need further attention.
📌 When mapping suppliers, prioritize higher-dollar transactions to focus on significant expenses. You can either:
Filter: Use the filter for Total Contract Value or Estimated ACV to set a threshold (e.g., $50,000) and focus on suppliers above this amount.
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To apply this filter:
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- Click on the Filters button at the top of the Suppliers table.
- Under Total Contract Value or Estimated ACV, enter your desired threshold.
- Apply the filter to narrow down results.
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Sort: Alternatively, click the arrows next to the Total Contract Value, Estimated ACV, or Actual Spend (Last 12 months) columns to sort values from high to low. This allows you to quickly identify the most significant suppliers based on spend data.
By leveraging these options, you can ensure contracts are created for critical spend items and maintain accurate, actionable spend data.
If you encounter cases where spend reporting is complex—such as corporate card expenses or marketplace purchases—use Transaction Mapping to apply advanced rules and ensure these transactions report correctly in Tropic.
Why Start Here?
- AI simplifies the process, allowing you to quickly ignore or sort suppliers based on spend data.
- Supplier Matching provides a top-level alignment, making it easier to confirm AI-suggested matches and create rules for cases that need manual attention.
- Focus on high-spend and frequently used suppliers to ensure significant transactions are captured first.
Matching Supplier Names
Tropic’s AI automatically attempts to match supplier names from your ERP with high-confidence accuracy. For medium- and low-confidence cases, you can review, confirm, or adjust matches to ensure they align correctly. To maintain consistency:
- Keep supplier names in your ERP unchanged to ensure accurate matching.
- Tropic will suggest matches that closely align with ERP data, reducing manual work while preserving accuracy.
Tip: To better understand the source of a charge, add a note in the invoice/memo or in the supplier name in your business system. This allows you to verify matches or create rules based on specific details.
Prioritizing and Maintaining Supplier Matching
- AI will automatically handle high-confidence matches for your highest-spend suppliers. Review medium- and low-confidence suggestions to ensure significant transactions are captured
- Next, prioritize suppliers with frequent transactions, as these often indicate recurring expenses. Establishing accurate matches for these suppliers will streamline your financial tracking and reporting processes.
- Ensure all critical suppliers are matched to maintain accurate spend data.
- Regularly review and update your supplier matches to ensure they remain accurate. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of transactions.
When to Ignore Suppliers
Ignoring should be reserved for non-essential spend tracking, such as one-time or non-SaaS purchases that don’t represent contracted spend.
Example: One-time purchases like "1-800 FLOWERS" can be ignored since they don't need detailed tracking.
Bulk ignore /restore suppliers
To ignore several suppliers at once, go to the Unmatched or Matched tab in Supplier Matching, check one or more supplier rows, and click Bulk Ignore. To restore previously ignored suppliers, select the suppliers and click Restore to move them back to the Unmatched tab.
Understanding AI Confidence Ratings
Tropic’s system uses AI to automatically suggest supplier matches based on metadata from your ERP. Suppliers are matched with high, medium, or low confidence:
- High-confidence (>= 80%) matches are automatically applied.
- Medium-confidence (>= 50%, < 80%) and low-confidence (>= 25%, < 50%) matches require user review and confirmation.
- No suggestion (< 25%) will be made if the confidence is too low.
Completing Supplier Matching ensures your vendor data is accurately aligned with Tropic, providing clear visibility into your organization’s spending.
Example: You buy computers from Apple. In your ERP (NetSuite, Sage, Quickbooks), Apple is onboarded as “Apple, Inc.” In Tropic, Apple is entered as Apple, Incorporated. The goal of supplier matching is to “match” those two suppliers so you can report and have visibility into spending with the same supplier over time.
Granularity in Supplier Matching
You may find that you have a situation where it's not as simple as 1:1 matching between ERP system vendors and Tropic Suppliers. For these situations we recommend moving on to the next section to learn about Transaction Mapping.
Moving on to Transaction Expenses
If you need to match transactions at the expense level, see Managing Transaction Expenses with Data Matching for step-by-step guidance.
Additional Resources
After mapping all your suppliers, you can leverage your mapped data for various purposes:
- Financial Analysis: Understand spending patterns and make informed financial decisions.
- Spend Management: Optimize your procurement processes and control costs.
- Informed Decision-Making: Use data-driven insights to enhance your business strategies.
For more information about documentation and training guides visit our Help Center.