Vendors in QuickBooks Online

A vendor is an individual or business that another business buys products and services (i.e items) from. Usually, this is a product supplier, utility, landlord, or subcontractor who does work for the business.

Users add vendors into QuickBooks Online so they can quickly associate them with bills, expenses, and other sales forms.

Learn more about how QuickBooks Online users add and manage vendors.

How this relates to app development

Your app needs to be able to link vendors to specific transactions such as bills, bill payments, and vendor credits. These require vendor data so QuickBooks knows who to associate the info with.

Tip: The individuals and businesses a business sells items to are known as customers. It’s quite common for a customer to also be a vendor.

Design your app so it can track your end-user’s existing customers and vendors.

Use the Vendor entity to create and query vendor data.
Use the Customer entity to create and query customer data.

Vendors and customers may already exist in a user’s QuickBooks Online company. It’s important to look them up before creating a new object to avoid errors.

Tip: Our APIs always refer to customers as “customers” vendors as “vendors.” But keep in mind, QuickBooks Online users can customize and rename individuals based on their preference. You can check the AccountingInfoPrefs.CustomerTerminology attribute of the Preferences endpoint to see how users define their “customers” or “vendors,”