A vendor record is small, and you need it before the first purchase order.
Typing one out of a business card at the end of a showroom visit is the kind of
job that gets postponed until the order is already late.
Atelier can read one instead — from a photograph, a document, or the vendor’s
own website — and hand you a filled-in form to check. Nothing is saved until
you confirm it, so the worst case is a form you close.
Each import costs one AI credit.
Three ways in
The first is the usual door, and despite the name it takes more than cards: a
specification, a quote, an invoice, a screenshot of an email, or a website
address.
Inside an existing vendor the offer narrows to a file — there is no website
field there — and it only fills what is blank. Anything you have already
written stays as it is, so reading a quote into a vendor you have been keeping
by hand cannot overwrite your own work.
What comes back
The name, what they supply, and any contact details that were actually there —
an address, a phone number, an email, and a named person if the source names
one. It arrives as an ordinary vendor form, filled in. Correct anything that is
wrong, add what is missing, and save.
Blank fields are usually correct, not a failure. Most supplier home pages carry
no address or phone at all, and a vendor read from one comes back with a name,
a category and nothing else. That is the honest answer for that page.
Why it leaves fields empty
This is worth understanding, because it looks like the import underperforming
when it is the opposite.
A model asked to fill a form will fill it. Given a page with no contact details
on it, earlier versions of this import returned a phone number, a street
address and a sales manager — none of which existed anywhere on the site. A
plausible invention is worse than a blank, because a blank is obviously
unfinished and an invention is not: it gets saved, and six weeks later an order
goes to an address nobody checked.
So the details that must be copied rather than worked out — email, phone,
address, website, and the whole contact person — are checked against the source
before they reach you, and dropped when they are not in it. A contact whose
name is not in the source is dropped entirely, since a name is the one part of
a person that cannot be inferred.
The name and category are different: those are read off the page as a whole, so
“Lighting” is a fair answer for a site selling pendant lamps even though the
word may not appear.
Websites and documents differ
A website import is checked against the page’s own text, so a detail either
appears on that page or does not appear in your form.
A document import — a card, a quote, a scan — has no such text to check
against. Obvious dummies are still struck out, but a plausible-looking phone
number on a blurry scan cannot be told from a real one.
Give a document import a glance before saving, particularly the phone and
email. That is the one path where a wrong value can look right.
When it cannot read something
It says so, rather than producing something that looks like an answer. A file
that is too blurry to read, a document that turns out not to be about a
supplier, and one that names no company each get their own message, and nothing
is created.
A website that is slow, script-heavy or behind a sign-in may time out. Try the
vendor’s contact or about page rather than a deep link into their catalogue, or
add the vendor by hand — the record is only a few fields.
Afterwards
Everything the import fills in is an ordinary vendor record. It has no special
status, and nothing about it is locked: add the logistics contact it could not
know about, write down the terms you agreed, attach the quote.
Import at the moment you meet the vendor, not at order time. The card is in
your hand and the website is open; six weeks later you will be reconstructing
both under pressure.