Resolve item codes in review

The buyer's document says WIDGET-BLUE-M. The supplier's system has never heard of that; they call it ABC-100. Somebody has to know that those are the same thing.

That translation is the item-code mapping, and it is per supplier — the same buyer code can mean different things to two different suppliers, which is exactly why resolution happens on an order that already has a supplier.

You only have to do it once per code. The second order that carries WIDGET-BLUE-M resolves itself.

This step is out of order on purpose. Resolving twenty codes by hand takes twenty minutes; importing the supplier's price list takes ten and removes most of them.

With a catalog loaded, three things change: suggestions are drawn from codes the supplier really sells rather than guessed, a code that does not exist in their catalog is flagged instead of passing quietly, and the code field becomes a search over their real products.

See import a supplier catalog from a file, or point ProcuLink at their feed with keep a catalog in sync automatically.

In the Before you send list, an unresolved line offers the supplier code it thinks is right, with a confidence percentage beside it — for example "87% match".

Three responses, and choosing between them is the whole skill:

• Accept suggestion — you recognise it as correct. The field is filled and the line clears.
• Enter manually — the suggestion is wrong. Type the supplier's real code into the supplier code field and Save. With a catalog loaded this searches their products as you type.
• Leave it and come back — nothing is applied until you act. A suggestion is never taken automatically, and the confidence figure is always visible so you know how much to trust it.

Read the confidence honestly. A high number means the match is well supported, not that it is certainly right — for anything that would be expensive to get wrong, check the description as well as the code.

On an order with many suggested lines, two buttons sit above the list:

• Resolve all suggested — accepts every suggestion on the order, whatever its confidence.
• Accept ≥85% only — accepts the strong ones and leaves the rest for you.

Accept ≥85% only is the one to reach for most days. It clears the boring majority and leaves you the handful that genuinely need a decision, which is where your attention is actually worth something.

Save Resolve all suggested for orders from a supplier whose catalog you trust and whose codes you have seen resolve correctly many times before.

Open Partners → Suppliers → the supplier → Mappings. Every resolution you made is there, as a row: the Buyer code, the Supplier code, the Source it came from, and its Confidence.

The Source tells you where each mapping came from:

Confidence is shown as a percentage — high in green, middling in amber, low in red — so a table full of low red numbers is a signal to check a few by hand rather than trust the lot.

The real test is the second order. Upload or wait for another order from the same supplier and open it.

Lines carrying codes you have already resolved should arrive filled in, leaving only genuinely new products in the Before you send list. If the list is just as long as last time, the codes on the two documents are not identical — a stray prefix, a trailing space, or a different code column in the buyer's export.