Tradesimple Portal Notifications: Troubleshooting Trading Relationship Issues

Overview

This article outlines what actions to take when a portal notification is received advising that there is an issue with a trading relationship code.

Suppliers sending documents (such as Purchase Order Confirmations and Invoices) into the system usually receive this type of notification. Please be advised that as the Customer manages relationships, this article contains steps for the customer to take for troubleshooting.

Trading Relationships

In order to trade with a site, there must be a unique trading relationship between the site and the Supplier. This is known on Purchase to Pay as the Supplier’s Code for Unit. Suppliers may have other names for this code, such as account code.

The Supplier always provides Supplier’s Codes for Units. The Customer always manages them, at Head Office level.

The path to locate these on the Customer portal is below:

• Navigate to Maintain Suppliers
• Find the Supplier and select Relationships (see Fig.1)

Fig.1 – Relationships: Where Supplier’s Codes for Units are managed manually

No Trading Relationship Exists with the Specified Code

Please see Fig.2 below for an example of how the notification looks.

Fig.2 – Example of a portal notification relating to no trading relationship 

If there is no Supplier’s code for Unit set up against a site for a supplier, as seen in Fig.1, documents sent for the site will fail as the system will not be able to identify which site the document is intended for. In these cases, the notification in Fig.2 is generated advising there is no code.

After selecting Maintain Suppliers (Fig.1), there is the option to search for Supplier’s codes or sites.

If the relationship code comes back with no results or if the Suppliers Code for Unit field is blank against the intended site, this shows there is no relationship in place. The relevant code will need to be input and saved and the document resent.

More than one Trading Relationship Exists with the specified code

Please see Fig.3 below for an example of how the notification looks.

Fig.3 – An example of a portal notification for more than one trading relationship

If there is more than one site with the same Supplier’s code for Unit, the document will fail and send the notification. The system will not be able to distinguish which site the document is for due to the duplicate code.

It is possible, however, to have the same code under different suppliers.

The notification provides this code in the ‘Message’ section. In the Fig.3 example, this is ‘ABC123’.

In order to prevent future failures and troubleshoot, the duplicate code will need to be amended to a unique value.

The Customer can do this manually.

After following the path for Maintain Suppliers in Fig.1, there is the option to search for Supplier’s codes.

• Select the Search Suppliers Code radio button (see Fig.4)
• Search the Unit Code (e.g. ABC123)
• Amend duplicate value
• Select Save All Changes

Fig.4 – Duplicate Supplier’s code for Unit

If the duplicate code does not appear in this search, it may be under a site that has been disabled from trading. Closed sites do not show under ‘Maintain Suppliers’. The site will need to be enabled again by the Customer temporarily to remove the code.

Access to do this will be dependent on user permissions. Speak to a system administrator if there is no access to the below path.

• Navigate to Business Directory or My Business (permission dependent)
• Search for the site and select Enable Trading

The site should now be searchable via ‘Maintain Suppliers’ and the duplicate code visible to remove. It is best practice to remove the Supplier’s code for Unit before disabling a site.

• Disable the site again once the duplicate code is removed

Once the code is unique for the site, the document can be re-sent.

Also to note

On occasions, notifications can fail to generate. This can happen when a large file fails to pass validation and the resulting email is too large to generate. Failure to generate a notification can also occur when the file sent in has too many issues present within the file.

Please raise a technical ticket with the Support Team if documents are still failing after the troubleshooting steps have been taken.