Why HaloPSA's log to vendor button vanishes after one use

Connor: Hello, good day. I hope you are doing well. The sun is setting on this miserable rainy day in the UK, and I am finally recording this video. I did this five times this morning, then discovered something I wasn't sure about. And with every video I try and put out, I try and tell you everything I could possibly find out. Then the day has just gone away from me, and now it's 20 past eight. So my teeth are slightly purple because I'm currently indulging in some of that nice red grape juice. I'm sure you know what I mean. You may have a sneak peek of it during this small video. But essentially, I want to talk about suppliers and vendors today, and I'm going to be completely transparent. I've never really dug that deep into this part of HaloPSA. And from my limited understanding of it, I suppose I knew it was something that wasn't that great.

Um, and now I've dug deep into as much as I possibly can, I still don't think it's that useful for most of us. But knowledge is power, so I'm going to show you how it can be leveraged. So the whole idea with suppliers and vendors inside of HaloPSA is that when you're inside a ticket, you can start communicating with your vendor or supplier on behalf of a customer, on behalf of an issue in a ticket chain that is hidden from the customer, but keeps all your communication in one single pane of glass. The idea being is you could have a bug with, let's say, Sofos. I could raise that bug today, communicate back and forth, go on holiday, my colleague could then pick up my ticket and resume that communication.

I'm just going to close my emails off for a minute. No, I'm not, because I want to show you something. I will put this over here. Okay, let's get stuck into scene one. So vendors and suppliers on the left hand side. If yours says vendor, that is because you're either on an older version of HaloPSA or you're on the American language pack. And if yours says supplier, that means you're on the newer UK version, and you can change it. Configuration, we go to language, customise language, and I think it is on the tab, um, key terms. And I think research supplier. Yeah, there we go. We can rename both of these to either be vendor or supplier or honestly whatever you like. Call it Connor, if you like. For me, you know, um, it doesn't matter. But essentially, that's what this is.

If you're not seeing vendor or supplier on the left hand side, you need to go to configuration in the bottom left, go to all features at the top, and make sure you have supplier or vendor turned on. Like so. If you turn it off, supplier disappears. Turn it on, it reappears again. So let's start with some basics. Let's go through this page, shall we? So when you click on supplier, you will have, rightly so, a list of your suppliers. And you can make a new one by clicking new in the top right. You can import them from your accounts integration, QuickBooks Online, and manually import them, or you can manually create them.

I'm just going to go through the pre-built-in ones today. Typically, I normally just trash all these and we start from fresh. But let's go through each tab quickly, explain what each tab is used for and what the purpose of it is, and then show you how we can use suppliers and vendors.

So the first tab being details. We can go away, keeper, thank you. We can set up a supplier name. This is the name of your supplier. Show is active. If you untick that, it won't appear in the dropdown list. We can then give a main contact name and title. This could be director. This could simply be Mr. or Mrs. It's completely up to you how you encounter that one. Then we can set up a billing email address, a support email address. We can add a few phone numbers, or mobile or fax number, address or website. This is all just for information purposes. Do note though, if you add a support email address, this will be added to the ticket when we do log to vendor. I will show you that moment momentarily.

And I will type in here YouTube at Connor is proving a point.com. There we go. Further down, we have supplier portal. This is where you can log your vendor or supplier's portal, add the URL, and add in a reference, add in a username and password. And I am just going to stop there and say I don't advocate this personally. Um, I would always recommend keeping passwords in a password management solution. If you don't have one of those, store it in your documentation solution. And if you don't have one of them either, then HaloPSA is not a bad shout. But I try and keep all of my eggs out of the same basket, obfuscation and all that jazz. Keep things separately is the way to go. But it's your company, not mine. Do as you desire.

Secondly, we have tickets. This means when we have a ticket and we log to vendor, on the ticket, as in we, you know, interact with the vendor, it will appear under the vendor's tickets. This way, we can quickly assess and see how many tickets do we currently have awaiting this vendor. CRM notes is exactly that. I could ring up my supplier or vendor after I don't know, once a quarter, and I could add in notes that we spoke about. We are going to get a better rate, we're going to get some marketing budget, we're going to get a bigger kickback, we're going to be incentivised, whatever you want, you can add it in here just to record a conversation basically.

Contacts is pretty useful. Contacts is where we can store contacts at the vendor. So we could have Tim Bowers at HaloPSA. He's the head. We go to him in dire emergencies. But we may use, I don't know, sorry, Morgan, we could use Morgan for anything relating to the API. You know, and you'll typically have maybe an accounts manager, a support contact, et cetera, et cetera. And this is where you basically store them. And the benefit of this is when we're doing a ticket, we can select a contact from the list of supplier's contacts on whom we want to engage with on the ticket.

Next, we have agreements. And the reason I'm doing this at such an hour is because I got hung up on this earlier. I got hung up with the question to Tim, sorry, Tim, of what is the point of having the agreement here? Now I understand intrinsically what the point is. We can have a start and an end date and know that we have a start and an end date. But outside of that, I was very confused to the point of it. Um, essentially, it's to do with the SLA. Um, and I'm not saying this is amazing, just to be clear. But we can basically assign a service level agreement to a supplier's agreement. So what that means is we could log a ticket with HaloPSA, and let's say we buy their support package, if they had one. Um, and we could say we have premium support, which is a one hour SLA. We could therefore dictate at this agreement level that whenever we log a ticket to our vendor, that time is going to be ticking down.

Now, as MSPs, we all know how toxic SLAs can be, especially when you're judging a partner's ability to act on it. That's the same reason why a lot of MSPs don't sell based on SLA, but just note that is the use of it. I will show you a few things more in a minute. And also, please do note that there is an option to set the default agreement. So if you have multiple SLAs or multiple agreements with a supplier, you can default one of them so it always appears first.

Then we've got assets. The B, I have purchased this asset from this supplier, link that on the asset. It will appear under here. We could have products. So I have a Netgear Nighthawk R7000. God knows how old that is now. But we could say we purchased this piece of hardware from exclusively this supplier. Purchase order says we have this many purchase orders at the minute outstanding for that supplier. We're trying to buy things from them. Documents is a documentation store. And settings is where things start to get complicated. I say complicated, the producers and the importance, I suppose, of why you would actually want to mess about in here.

So first of all, the domain name is quite simple. As you see here, I tested this a minute ago. We could have the domain name Ingram Micro. This means when they reply back to one ticket, it will check and match the domain name to match it to that ticket. You'll see there is comma comma. That's not a comma. That's a bracket, Connor. You'll see there's a bracket after the word name. This basically means that you can have multiple domains. So you can have ingrammico.com, go to UK, whatever your heart desires.

Next, we have email star and end tag. Well, I'm just going to pull up a reference very quickly here. If you look at my communication with support, Halo, and this is them graciously telling me that my Renada sandbox environment um has been updated from my UAT or vice versa. I can't even work it out. But essentially, you'll notice in the summary that there is this little bit here, and that is bracket Halo colon a number closing bracket. What is the point of that? Well, when we're looking at start tags predominantly in HaloPSA now, it is asking for what is a way we can identify tickets from the supplier to match to this ticket? If we were just matching on the domain name and we had four tickets to vendor, how would we know which one it needs to go to right?

Um, or even so, how would we know that they actually want to be a vendor email, not just an email from the supplier? You know, we get marketing crap all the time. And well, this is exactly where we want to look at that. So the email start tag, here, and I'm just going to grab the whole thing, okay? I'm going to copy it into the email start tag. Well, we needed start tag and we require an end tag. So the end tag is always the last thing that is persistent, I.e., bracket. The start tag is something that is persistent, but obviously, the number, this can be unique. This is unique per ticket. This is an integer that we don't want to have in here permanently. So I'm going to remove that. And that then forms the start and end tag.

This means when they reply back to a ticket, they will look between these two things, between bracket Halo colon and the end bracket, for something to match on. And I'll demonstrate that hopefully in a few minutes. But that's what that means.

Moving further down, you will see there's a service level agreement dropdown. This is where I got stuck earlier, thank you, Tim, once again. If we have an agreement and if on that agreement we set a service level agreement, and if we want to show that service level agreement timer on a ticket, I know, get me started, we need to make sure we have the show supplier SLA details. Park this, save this timestamp in the video if you like what you see, come back to this point here, 11 minutes and 12 seconds. And that is basically that you can give API access if you want. And if the supplier uses HaloPSA or any of the API details below, I'm not going to tell you about any of this right now. That is going to be rare at best.

So what does all this mean? We now know where the supplier section is, how to enable it, how to set up some of the settings. But what's the point? The point is exactly the following. I can do a new ticket to general user. I, Acorn Construction, and they could be telling me that their Sofos is not installing. We, as a support provider or partner, have tried to fix it, but we're at a loss. So what we now need to do is log this to a vendor. Basically, saying please help me. Okay.

Now, if you don't have this log to vendor um action at the top of your screen, what you need to do is go to configuration, go to tickets, go to actions, and find the log to vendor action. If you don't have the log to vendor action, you can simply make a new action. But the important thing to know is two things. And one, you need to use the system use log to supplier, log to vendor, and the field list you're going to require. And the only one you need is the supplier one. Now this is a bit odd inside of HaloPSA, I must admit. There's a lot of things going on with this single field. And I will show you in a moment. But this is very important to use in conjunction with login to supplier.

Why do I say it's important? Well, that's because a lot of these fields are dynamic. You don't have any control over them. They're a little bit wild in my opinion. But essentially, the first thing it says is right, you want to log a response to a supplier or vendor. Um, who do you want that to be? Well, I want to pick Ingram Micro. You'll see that as soon as I select Ingram Micro, YouTube at Connor is proving apoint.com is populated. Well, that's not great because I don't always want to email that person. So what I'm just going to do in this scenario is remove YouTube, Connor is proving your point.com. And instead, what I want to do is make a user here and call this support and enter an email address. Um, support youtubepoint.com. And save that. Like so.

What that now means is if I log this to vendor again and select Ingram Micro, it now won't auto fill an email address, which in my opinion is the better way to use it, unless you just have a single point of contact at a vendor and it's always going to be the same. In which case, use it. You might even say actually, in your support email address, make it your success manager or partner manager. You know, I used to do a lot with the Cronis, and I would always CC in my success manager or partner manager when dealing with support. So here, transparency on the issues I was facing on a day-to-day basis. That was his request, not mine. I am not a complete and utter buffoon. But essentially, that is how we leverage or turn off that second.

Of all, we've got agreement. Now, if we have an agreement at the customer level, then you'll notice priority will appear. If I pick Lenovo, Microsoft, Pax8, any of them, let me try again. Yeah, there we go. So I've currently picked Apple, and Apple doesn't have any agreement. Therefore, the supply, the, what was it called, I've forgotten already, the priority box, sorry, I was thinking of tickets where you've got urgency or whatever, the priority box um doesn't appear because we don't have an agreement with an SLA with priorities. Okay.

So just to reiterate that one more time, if I select Apple, there is no agreement to be selected. Unfortunately, I can't hide this. I wish I could. But um, the priority will not appear because I don't have one. I go back to Ingram Micro though, and say yes, I want to select agreement 456, 456, 456. You could have multiple priorities. And I would say this is an urgent request to Ingram Micro. And I'm going to fill in that there.

You can also append a supplier reference. So let's say you log a ticket to your supplier and they don't reply with um, well, let me wear that a bit differently. Let's say you email HaloPSA, okay? And they reply back with I will demonstrate if I can find the email, and they reply back with HaloPSA 492693. Well, what I'm going to want to do is add that into this box here because that is unique for that correspondence chain. Does that make sense? Hopefully, it does. It will then look at those incoming emails, and whenever it matches a haloPSA.com and that number, it will log it to this ticket because the start and end tag is looking for brackets Halo colon something and brackets.

Contact, I could say I want to pick the support contact, and that will then log this to support youtubepoint.com. And then I can click save. That will obviously then email um the supplier. What you'll then notice on the right hand side is a few things. So I mentioned earlier, you wanna, pardon me, sorry, that's a red grape juice is repeating. Um, I mentioned earlier that you might want to show the SLA show you know what the SLA time remaining is, and if you do want to show this down here, you have got to click that tip box. This tip box is not universal. This is per supplier. Just remember to do that.

And just see on the right hand side, you've got some details. So who you've logged it to, okay? When you logged it in respect to what agreement and their reference number. If you log a ticket to them and they reply back and it doesn't match because they've used their own internal IDs, you can merge that with this ticket, and that will then update the supplier reference. If your start and end tags are set up correctly, what you'll notice is, once you've logged it to vendor, that is very much a one-time use, okay? So that action button at the top is now gone. You can't have a ticket logged to multiple vendors. It is very much a one-to-one relationship.

Um, well, a lot of people get stuck is well, now what? How do I email them again? So out of the box, HaloPSA for some reason don't include this, but I'm going to show you how to do that. And again, it is by leveraging another action. So you'll see at the top there is no email supplier, email vendor. I've logged it once and I'm kind of stuck now. If they reply back, I can't reply again. So what you want to do is first of all, go to configuration, tickets, actions, and find the one vendor that is called email vendor. And you want to use the system use email supplier.

If I go into the workflow incident management, is that what I'm currently in? No idea. Yes, it is. And I add in the action, add allow action, email supplier or email vendor. And go back to the ticket. I now have the ability to email the vendor again. It will email the same person that is already addressed on the right hand side down here. And that is basically that.

So if you want to start communicating with your vendors or suppliers via your tickets, you can set them up inside of HaloPSA. The most complicated bit is getting your start and end tag set up correctly. And if needs be, the agreement. But I've never really found much benefit in this, to be honest. Um, I, yeah, it's one of those things. If you do a lot of communication through tickets and it's quite important that now through tickets to your third parties, to your vendors, I think this could be a brilliant use case for you. If you don't, then reduce the knowledge, reduce the confusion, get rid of it for now. If there's a point or moment in your career or MSP journey where you think you need it, then by all means set it up and walk through it slowly.

Um, and I think that is basically all there is to show you on this one. Um, if there's any questions, please put them in the comments below. And if you are not subscribed to me, please hit that subscribe button. I'm trying to get 500 subscribers before Christmas. I'm just over 100 away. That would be a nice milestone to achieve. Um, I've been Connor. This has been a 20 minute video. I hope you've enjoyed it. There's a lot of moving pieces, but I hope this gives you a full rundown on how the suppliers and vendors works inside of HaloPSA. Have a lovely rest of your day, and I'll speak to you all soon. Take care. I've been Connor. Bye-bye.