Vendors and Vendor Offices: What They Are and How They Work Together

In Brightflag, a Vendor is the overall law firm or service provider record (for example, "Smith Jones LLP"). A Vendor Office is a specific office or billing unit within that firm (for example, "Smith Jones LLP, London" or "Smith Jones LLP, New York").

A vendor must have at least one office before it can be assigned to a matter, before invoices can be submitted, or before vendor users can be added. One vendor can have several offices, but each office belongs to exactly one vendor.

What is a Vendor?

A Vendor is the parent record for a law firm or other outside provider your organisation works with. Brightflag maintains a shared Global Vendor List, so when adding a new vendor you can usually select the firm from that list rather than creating a new record from scratch. If the firm doesn't exist yet, you can request that Brightflag add it.

You can also set a custom name for how a vendor appears in your account, separate from the firm's registered name, if that's useful for internal reporting.

What is a Vendor Office?

A Vendor Office represents a specific location or billing unit within a vendor. This is the level at which most day-to-day activity in Brightflag actually happens:

• Matters are assigned to a specific office, not just to the vendor as a whole.
• Invoices are submitted from and tied to an office.
• Vendor users are added at the office level, unless they've been given access to the whole vendor.
• Vendor Paysites, which control which entity and currency combinations a vendor can invoice against, are configured against the vendor and office together.

Because of this, you can't assign work to a vendor or add a vendor user until at least one office exists for it.

How do Vendor and Vendor Office relate to each other?

It's a one-to-many relationship, one Vendor, potentially many Offices.

• A large international firm might have a single Vendor record with separate offices for London, New York, and Singapore.
• A smaller firm might have a Vendor record with just one office.
• Every office always belongs to exactly one vendor. Offices don't exist independently or get shared across two vendor firm records.

User access follows the same structure. A Vendor Admin can access all offices under that vendor, view all matters and invoices firm-wide, and manage users across every office. A user with office-level access is limited to the matters, invoices, and users within that one office and can't see other offices belonging to the same firm.

Why are vendors and offices modelled separately?

• Billing accuracy across entities and currencies. Larger firms often invoice from different legal entities or currencies depending on location. Vendor Paysites use the vendor and office combination to validate that invoices are submitted against the correct entity and currency, catching mismatches before they reach your Accounts Payable system.
• Controlled, scoped access. You can grant a user visibility into only their own office's matters and invoices, rather than exposing an entire firm's activity to every user at that firm. This matters where a firm handles work for you from multiple locations that shouldn't necessarily see each other's data.
• Flexible Preferred Counsel tagging. Preferred Counsel status can be applied to an entire vendor at once, or to specific offices only, so you can recognise a firm as preferred overall or just for the offices you actually work with.
• Cleaner handling of firm changes. Vendors, offices, and users are managed as distinct records, which is part of why Brightflag has separate processes for things like managing duplicate vendor records or a law firm merger, without those changes disrupting other offices' existing matters and invoices.

How do I get a firm-wide view across all of a vendor's offices?

• In Vendor Management, when you open a vendor, its offices are listed underneath it, and you can select the whole vendor or specific offices only (this is how Preferred Counsel tagging works, for example).
• Preferred Counsel reporting shows a filled star against vendors that are fully preferred, meaning all of their offices carry Preferred Counsel status, which gives you a firm wide signal at a glance