Work with Suppliers
Suppliers records who you buy from. Orders is the lab's record of what was requested, what's on the way, and what arrived. Both sit under Inventory in the sidebar.
Conspecta is not a purchasing portal. It doesn't hold your account credentials, it doesn't send anything to a vendor, and it can't see your basket. Your lab already buys through supplier portals, an institutional system, or a purchasing office, and those are where the money actually moves.
What Conspecta does is close the loop around that. The working shape is:
- Record the request in Conspecta, so the lab can see what's been asked for and by whom
- Follow the link out to the supplier's own site and place the order there, the way you always have
- Come back and fill in the truth: the purchase order or invoice number, what it cost, and the receipt as an attachment
- Receive it into stock when the box lands, which updates the item's quantity and lot in the same step
That's the value: six months later the reagent on the shelf can be traced to an order, a price, a receipt, and a person, without anyone maintaining a parallel spreadsheet. Conspecta is the record and the memory, not the checkout.
Your vendor list belongs to the team, so everyone sees the same suppliers from every project and you enter Sigma-Aldrich once rather than once per project. Orders stay with the project, because what you spent belongs to the grant that paid for it.
Adding a Supplier
New supplier opens a searchable list of vendors Conspecta already knows, with their websites filled in. Pick one and it's added. Vendors already on your list are hidden from the picker so you can't add Thermo Fisher twice.
If yours isn't there, Create a custom supplier gives you a blank profile. Either way, the rest is filled in afterwards on the supplier's own page: contact name, email, phone, address, notes, lead time, and a logo you set by clicking the tile in the sidebar or dragging an image onto it.
Mark the vendors you actually use as Preferred. The list sorts preferred first by default, which is usually the order you want when you're deciding where to buy something.
The list opens as rows rather than cards, since a vendor is a name and a lead time rather than a picture. Search matches names, contacts, emails, addresses, and notes. Import takes a CSV or TSV if you're bringing a list from elsewhere.
A supplier's Materials tab lists the items in your inventory that name them. Add materials opens a dialog box over your items with this supplier's materials already ticked. Tick more to assign them, and untick one to take it off the list. An item that names a different vendor shows that name beside it, so moving it here is a choice you make on purpose. The same link can still be set from the item's own page.
Deleting a supplier affects every project in the lab. Items and orders in projects you can't even see will lose that vendor. Conspecta says so before you confirm.
Ordering
New request records an order. The dialog box says so plainly: the actual purchase happens in your supplier portal.
There are two ways to fill it in:
- From inventory picks items you already track. Tick several at once across several suppliers, set a quantity on each, and one submit files them all, grouped by vendor. A Low / out of stock only toggle narrows the list to what actually needs reordering, which turns "what do we need?" into a two-minute job.
- Something new is for anything not in your inventory yet.
You're recorded as the requester automatically.
Tracking an Order
An order moves along a rail: Requested, then Processing, then Complete. Incomplete sits beside the rail rather than on it, because a partial delivery or a backorder isn't a later stage, it's the same stage with a problem. Click any step to move an order forwards or backwards.
Opening an order slides a panel in from the side while leaving the table clickable behind it, and the arrow keys step through orders without closing it. Inside, everything edits in place: quantity, unit, priority, catalog number, unit price and currency, total, invoice, purchase order and reference numbers, and links to the product page and receipt. Leave the total alone and it's the unit price times the quantity. Type one and yours wins until you clear it.
Product URL is the link back out to the supplier's page for that item, which is how you get from "we need more of this" to the vendor's basket in one click. Save it once on the item and every future order for it starts there.
Receipts can be attached as files, not just linked. Drag the PDF invoice or a photo of the packing slip onto the order, up to 25 MB. That attachment is usually what a grant audit or a finance query actually wants, and it's the step people skip when the record lives in email.
Every order carries a comment thread and an activity log, and a bell to follow it, which is how you get told when something you're waiting on changes without watching the list. You can approve an order from that thread, or ask a colleague for their sign-off, for a purchase that needs a second name on it.
Receiving
Marking an order with a linked inventory item Complete doesn't just close it. It opens Receive into inventory, which asks how much actually arrived, the lot number from the packing slip, and any notes, then adds that quantity to stock and records the transaction against the order.
The same dialog box asks what should happen to the order afterwards: Complete if everything arrived, or Incomplete if it was a partial delivery and the order should stay open. An order with no linked item just completes.
A Received section on the order then links to the stock transactions it created, so the paperwork and the shelf agree.
Working the Orders List
Tabs across the top split orders by status with a count on each, so Requested tells you how big the backlog is at a glance. Above the table, a totals row adds up what's on order. Mixed currencies are shown separately and joined, never converted, since Conspecta doesn't know what exchange rate your finance office uses.
Search matches item names and catalog numbers. Filter by supplier, requester, priority, dates, or Following to see only the orders you're tracking. Select rows to mark several processing, complete, or incomplete at once, export them, or unfollow them.
An order keeps the item's name as it was when you ordered it, so renaming a reagent later doesn't rewrite last year's purchasing history.
Exporting
The Orders list has its own Export, producing a CSV with a date range, supplier and status filters, and a column chooser. Suppliers and orders also export as Excel from Settings → Export.