Overview
The Vendor Lookup Report is one of our most popular reports at Davidson because it collects and aggregates large amounts of information from our finance system about vendors who send us invoices for payment, a business process which touches every department of the college. The Banner interface itself doesn't do a good job of presenting all that information, so the report was developed as searchable "one-stop shop" for vendor information.
The original Vendor Lookup Report was a paginated report, but the latest version has been upgraded into a Power BI report, allowing for more interactivity when filtering and sorting the data. The Power BI upgrade also allows Davidson to drastically improve the timeliness of the report through more frequent data refreshes.
View the Vendor Lookup Report
Watch a video tutorial of the Vendor Lookup Report
About Vendor Lookup Report Data
The data in this report comes directly from the Banner database, and is refreshed at the top of every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The last refresh time is visible at the top of each report page for easy reference.
Report Pages
Vendor Lookup
Provides a searchable interface for finding vendors, and displays pertinent info about direct deposit, address, etc. This page is virtually unchanged from the original Vendor Lookup Report in terms of what data it supplies, although it has been made more interactive.
To view additional information about a vendor, simply select them from the main table on this page. This will enable the two buttons at the bottom of the page that say “Invoices” and “Payments.” Click either of these two buttons to drill down into invoice or payment detail for that vendor.
Invoices
Displays a list of invoices for a given vendor, as well as the sum of all non-canceled checks for each invoice. From here, you can drill down to see all checks for a given invoice but selecting an invoice from the main table, and clicking the “Checks” button at the bottom of the page.
Payments
Displays a list of payments for a given vendor, or for a given vendor-invoice combination.
Info
The Info page gives valuable information about the report itself, including definitions about vendor types and address types, and it explains how data is filtered in the report. This page is accessible from any other page in the report.
Report Navigation
This diagram shows the possible navigation options between the main pages of the report (Vendor Lookup, Invoices, and Payments). Note that you can navigate to the Info page from any other page in the report.
On each of the sub-pages, you will find two buttons in the upper-left corner: Back and Home.
The Back button will return you to the previous report page you were looking at.
The Home button will return you to the Vendor Lookup page, regardless of what page you are currently looking at and what steps you took to get there.
