A Company represents a business or individual that you do business with.

To send a payable or receivable, you must first create a Company.

Customers and Vendors

In Routable, we support two types of Companies: Vendors and Customers. A Vendor is someone you pay, and a Customer is someone who pays you.

When creating Companies via our API, we support creating a company as either a Customer or a Vendor. Use the is_customer and is_vendor fields to determine the company type. Using the Routable Dashboard, however, you can set a company to be both a Customer and a Vendor.

Business or Personal?

When creating a company, take note that there are two different types of companies: business and personal.

• You would create a company as business when they are acting as a sole proprietorship, LLC, or corporation.
• You would create a company as personal when they are acting as a contractor or a freelancer.

Also, take note that the parameters available to configure the company are slightly different between the two types of companies. We've documented these differences in the request schema.

What's in a name?

When creating a company, we allow you to set different names based on the type of company.

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For business companies, business_name must be the company's legal name!

If the business_name for your company is incorrect, it can cause issues for payments.

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Pro Tip - Avoid Personal Naming Collisions

When working with many personal companies, it's common to run into naming collisions. We recommend including some sort of unique ID in the name such as Jane Doe [bHvRzbRA]. If you have an external ID you use to track companies in your application, we recommend that you use it here.

Your finance team might have preferences here; consider checking with them.

Inviting a Company

When you create a Company, you can provide all of the data about their preferred and available methods of payment, but you don't have to. Using the Invite a Company feature of the Routable API, you can set up just the basics of a Company and then send them an Invitation. The default Contact on the Company will receive an email (sent as the Active Team Member) that will invite them to click a link to populate their information.

Upon clicking the link, the company contact will be taken to a page hosted by Routable that allows them to enter their own company information - including their tax identifiers and Payment Methods.

Until the Company has at least one Payment Method on file, the company will be in the invited status. Only once they've added a Payment Method by completing their invitation will they be transitioned to the accepted status, in which they can receive Payables.

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Company Statuses

A Company can have exactly one of the following three status values:

• added: The Company has been created on the Routable Dashboard or via the API. No invitation has been sent, and no PaymentMethods have been entered. Payables may be initiated to this vendor, but they will not be processed to completion until the vendor is invited (and completes the onboarding process) or a PaymentMethod is added via the API.

• invited: The Company has been sent an invitation, either via email or an embedded link. However, no Contact on the Company has accepted the invitation and entered PaymentMethod information yet.

• accepted: The Company has one or more valid PaymentMethods attached, either because you added them programmatically via the API (thus, skipping the invited status altogether) or because a Contact of the Company completed the invitation process via our external onboarding flow and added their own payment method(s).