By definition One-time suppliers are supported in Financials only and not in Purchase module.

According to the documentation One-time suppliers are supplier IDs that can be used to keep a record of the different supplier addresses where there is no need to follow-up on the total purchases and other figures per name and address.

Supplier specific information like name, address, tax number, AP supplier contact information and electronic bank address can be entered when an invoice for a one-time supplier is created. 

It is possible to enter and update one-time specific information with the following processes:

1. Manual Supplier Invoice
2. Outgoing Supplier Invoice
3. External Supplier Invoices (no update of existing one-time information)
4. Supplier Analysis / Ledger Items
5. Supplier Payment Proposal Details

It is not possible to do purchase using a supplier record which does not have info in Supplier screen/Purchase tab as those info are needed for the purchase order process. Therefore, we need to create the info in the Purchase tab.

If you want to prevent purchase after you did one time, you can use the ‘Expiration Date’ field in Supplier screen/Purchase/Misc Supplier Info tab.

Thanks for the explanation @Manoj Balasooriya. I feel my question has been misunderstood.

I’ve read the documentation and realized that one time suppliers are supported in Financials module only. And my question is regarding the rationale behind it. Why did IFS decide on such a definition/functionality?

I have seen a couple of posts on the community page where customer requirement is to use one-time supplier functionality in both raising PO and invoice. I.E. to use the same supplier entity for multiple suppliers simply because we will never be using that supplier again. So there is no point setting up different supplier records and we want to keep the supplier registration process simple. The use of expiration date will not facilitate this. That is useful when we no longer wish to use a supplier for POs. The same way when creating invoice for a one-time supplier where it’s prompted to enter payment and address info, it would be great if purchase info can be entered for one-time supplier when a PO is being created. Can this please be considered as an idea for the future functional enhancements as there are other posts (by other customers) too around this requirement?

As mentioned in answer in another question also the idea of one-time functionality is to provide a master supplier to record one time addresses/one time information (less frequent different supplier addresses where there is no need to follow-up on the total purchases and other figures per name and address) because there is no point to create a complete supplier master record in your AP, if you are not dealing with that address/information again. You can create a single one-time supplier and keep addresses separately in that supplier record for one time purchases. Under single supplier, you can keep bank accounts of the different suppliers. So, one-time supplier will act as a master (dummy) supplier.

So as I understand one-time supplier record is not a supplier you use one time. It is a master supplier record that can maintain one-time information that are used for other suppliers.

If your requirement is to minimize supplier records creating effort and use same supplier record for purchases from multiple suppliers over time, what about using a normal supplier record (not one-time supplier) and change the supplier name and other details accordingly when required to reflect the change. Please check whether it will cater to your requirement if it is possible.

And about enabling purchase for one-time suppliers I encourage you to create a topic in the community in the category ‘Idea’ to be considered for the future developments. But enabling this will not be meaningful when the rationale of one-time supplier is considered.

Hi @Manoj Balasooriya thanks for your reply. 

We are on the same page about what one time supplier is. However it is the rationale behind not enabling it for POs where there is confusion.

In the first paragraph, it is mentioned about one time purchases. So again it comes back to my question; if one time suppliers are not enabled to be used in Purchase Orders, how do you actually use a one time supplier for one time purchases? IFS cannot say ‘no you are not supposed to issue a PO for them, you are only supposed to create an invoice for them’. It is not the practical real world scenario. 

The use of the normal supplier record and changing Delivery Address on the purchase order for each purchase could work. We will see if that can be used for our scenario. Thank you.

@TAPSUDJAY, As I understood it,  one-time supplier is not a record we create for one specific supplier. It just keeps the records for other suppliers.

As an example: We do a purchase with Supplier A with whom we do business and it is recorded as a normal supplier. But we want to use an address for invoicing which will be used this time only. We don’t want to add this address to Supplier A, because we use that address only for this time. Therefore, we add this address to an one-time supplier record.

We do the purchase using Supplier A, but for invoicing we use a new address which will be saved in the separate one-time supplier record. That one-time supplier record has many addresses like that for other suppliers Supplier B, C and D etc. i.e. each one-time address is considered as an individual supplier. Therefore, this specific one-time supplier record does need to have the ability to do purchase because it is not a real supplier.

If we want to use that address in manual supplier invoice - “One-time specific information can be entered and updated at invoice entry”. A new one-time address ID is created in the one-time supplier record we specify (one-time supplier record is already created in the system) when new one-time specific information is saved.” We can see that in the screenshots of Shehan’s answer in below question.