Approved Suppliers

Approved Suppliers is a register of suppliers — materials, equipment, contractor services, laboratory, or other — with an approval status and a performance rating that's reviewed on a schedule.

Buying from an unapproved or under-performing supplier can undo compliance work done elsewhere — a material without proper certification, or a contractor service that repeatedly underdelivers. Keeping approval status and evaluation dates as first-class fields, rather than tribal knowledge, makes "can we buy from this supplier right now" a question the register can answer directly.

Each supplier record has a category, an approval status (approved, conditional, not-approved), a performance rating (Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor), and the dates of its last and next evaluation. Moving a supplier between approval statuses is a direct field edit — there's no separate approval workflow layered on top.

The list page shows every supplier with its category, approval status, performance rating and next evaluation date, filterable and sortable by any of those. The detail page shows the full record; create and edit forms share the same fields.

• Supplier name — required.
• Category — required. One of Materials, Equipment, Contractor Services, Laboratory, Other.
• Approval status — required. One of approved, conditional, not-approved. Defaults to conditional for a new supplier.
• Last evaluation date / Next evaluation date — both required. Define the evaluation cycle for this supplier.
• Performance rating — required. One of Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor.

Nothing elsewhere in the product reads a supplier's approval status automatically — the Procurement module's own compliance-document gating checks certificates/SDS on file, not this register's approval status, so keeping a supplier's status current here is a manual discipline, not an enforced gate on purchasing from them.

Does an evaluation past its "next evaluation date" change the supplier's status automatically? No — the dates are fields to filter and sort by; nothing recalculates approval status or performance rating automatically.