Vendors & Customers
Partner records, statements of account as PDF, and vendor cost tracking per job with exchange-rate conversion.
Routel keeps a record for every company you work with. Customers are who you invoice. Vendors are carriers, co-loaders, haulers, customs brokers and anyone else whose costs land on your jobs. The records are deliberately light: enough to run operations and finance, without turning into a CRM project.
Customers
| Name and registration | Legal name as it should appear on quotations, invoices and the B/L. |
|---|---|
| Contacts | People and email addresses for operations and accounts. |
| Payment terms | Days from invoice date to due date. Drives aging and overdue reports. |
| Credit limit | Optional. Exposure against it is shown on new jobs and invoices. |
| Currency preference | MYR or USD by default when invoicing this customer. |
| Sales owner | The Sales user responsible. Sales users see only their own customers. |
The customer page lists everything about the relationship: quotations, jobs, invoices, payments, notes and the running balance. From here you can raise a quotation, open any job, or generate a statement.
Credit limits and applications
Give a customer a limit and Routel shows the current exposure, open invoices plus jobs in progress, whenever someone creates a job or an invoice for them. A credit application records a request to set or raise the limit; Accounting reviews and approves it, and the new limit takes effect on the record. See Invoicing & Finance.
Vendors
| Name and contacts | Who they are and who to talk to. |
|---|---|
| Services | What they provide: ocean freight, haulage, customs, documentation. |
| Default currency | The currency they usually bill in, typically USD for carriers. |
| Payment terms | Used for the payables view in the Receivables & Payables hub. |
The vendor page lists route rates from that vendor, costs recorded against jobs, and what has been paid.
Vendor costs per job
A vendor cost is a line on a job for something a vendor charged you for that shipment.
| Vendor | Who charged it. |
|---|---|
| Description | Ocean freight, THC, haulage, customs clearance and so on. |
| Currency and amount | In the vendor's currency. |
| Exchange rate | The rate used to convert to MYR. Defaults from the job; can be overridden per line. |
| MYR equivalent | Computed. This is what feeds gross profit. |
| Vendor invoice reference | The vendor's invoice number, and the PDF attached. |
| Status | Unpaid or paid, with the payment date. |
Recording costs promptly is what makes the job P&L trustworthy. The job page shows revenue, converted cost, gross profit and margin the moment a cost is saved.
Let the assistant read the vendor invoice
Upload the vendor's PDF in the chat and ask: "Propose the vendor cost for this on JOB-2026-0412." The assistant extracts the line items, currency and total into a proposed cost. Check it against the paper and confirm. See AI Assistant.
Statements of account
A statement of account (SOA) summarises the relationship for a period: opening balance, invoices, payments, notes and closing balance for a customer; costs and payments for a vendor. Statements are generated as PDF from the partner record, from the Receivables & Payables hub, or by asking the assistant: "Download Al Noor's statement for August."
Through the assistant
"Create a customer called Al Noor Trading LLC, 30-day terms, USD" or "Which vendors do we owe more than USD 5,000?" both work, the first as a proposal to confirm, the second as an immediate answer.
Who can do this
Accounting and Admin manage partner records, credit limits and statements. Sales manages their own customers' contact details. Operations records vendor costs on jobs.