Plenty of stores buy the same product from two or three distributors - whoever has it in stock this week, whoever gets you to free shipping, and then price. Stockroom lets you record all of them against an item, each with their own part number, case size and minimum, and shows you what each one last charged you.
Add a supplier to an item
Open a product and find the Supplier ordering section. Under Other suppliers for this item, click Add a supplier, pick one from your supplier list, and fill in whatever applies:
Supplier SKU - their part number for this item. It prints on the purchase order you send them, and it is what their order sheet matches on when you import one.
Pack size and Pack name - how many units they ship together, and what they call it. The "3 cases of 4" breakdown on a purchase order comes from here.
Minimum order - the fewest units they will sell you of this item.
Every field is optional. Naming a supplier and leaving the rest blank is still worth doing - it records that they carry the item, which is what the rest of this article builds on.
The values at the top of the Supplier ordering section are your fallback, used for any supplier without a row of their own. A supplier's row wins field by field - so a distributor who only sells the case can sit at a pack size of 12 while the item itself stays at 1.
What each one last charged
Beside each supplier you will see Last paid $4.50 on 3 Aug, or Not ordered from yet. That comes from your own purchase orders - the most recent one you actually placed with that supplier for that item, after any line discount. Drafts do not count, and freight is not baked in.
Stockroom deliberately does not keep a price list. Distributor prices move whenever a shipment lands, so a list maintained by hand goes stale and quietly misleads you. What you paid last time is a fact, and it is dated so you can judge how old it is.
While you build a purchase order
Add an item to a purchase order and, if another supplier on record last charged less for it in the same currency, the line says so quietly: Distributor B charged $4.20. It is a note, not a warning - nothing moves the line, and nothing tells you to switch.
That is on purpose. Which distributor to use is mostly about who has it in stock today and who gets you to free freight, and those are things you know and we do not. So we give you the one piece we do have - what you paid - and the choice stays yours.
Everything else follows the supplier the order is for: their part number prints on the PDF, their pack size drives the pack breakdown, and importing their order sheet resolves part numbers against them first - the same code on a different supplier's file is not treated as a match. See Creating a purchase order from a CSV file.
Set them in bulk by CSV
For more than a handful of items, use Export CSV and Import CSV on the Inventory page. A supplier column takes a comma-separated list, and supplier_sku, pack_size, pack_unit and min_order_qty line up with it by position:
Distributor A,Distributor B against DA-1001,DB-88 gives each of them their own code.
An empty slot means the item's own fallback value, so ,Distributor A reads as "the default, then Distributor A".
A single value against several suppliers applies to all of them.
Anything else that does not line up fails that row and tells you which, rather than guessing.
A supplier name Stockroom does not recognize is refused, never created, so a typo cannot quietly invent a distributor.
Download a template in the import dialog gives you the columns with an example row already in place. Leave the supplier column out and your file behaves exactly as it always has.
Good to know
Removing a supplier from an item removes the row only. Purchase orders you already sent them, and the costs on them, are untouched.
Costs are shown in the currency you paid in. Stockroom never converts one supplier's price into another's currency to compare them - a converted figure is one nobody quoted.
Reorder suggestions use the item's own pack size and minimum, not a particular supplier's, because the suggestion is worked out before you have picked one. The per-supplier values take over on the purchase order itself.
Which supplier a product is grouped under on the Reorder page still comes from your auto-assign rules - the extra suppliers here are alternatives you can see, not a second reorder list. See Suppliers: automatic imports, details, and product rules.
Free freight is set per supplier rather than per item: fill in Free freight over on the supplier and every purchase order for them shows how close the subtotal is.