---
title: "Suppliers"
url: "https://docs.4hse.com/suppliers"
description: "What a supplier is in 4HSE, what its record holds, and how it connects to offices, work phases and approvals."
---

# Suppliers

A **supplier** is an external company that works in your offices: a contractor, a maintenance firm, a cleaning company. 4HSE registers them so that the interference between their work and yours can be assessed, documented and kept up to date.

A supplier record holds:

-   registry details and contacts;
-   documents;
-   the work phases they are involved in;
-   one or more user accounts, with their own access level to the platform.

![The supplier list of a project](/_astro/supplier-management-1.zFrKnlzA_HBdE2.webp)

## Why the work phase matters

[Section titled “Why the work phase matters”](#why-the-work-phase-matters)

Registering a supplier stores their details; connecting them to **what they do, and where** makes them assessable. A supplier linked to the work phases they carry out lets 4HSE assess the interference between their activity and yours. Without that link there is a name in a list and nothing else.

See [Link a work phase to a supplier](/suppliers/link-a-work-phase).

## Suppliers have users

[Section titled “Suppliers have users”](#suppliers-have-users)

A supplier is not only data you hold about someone else: it can be a party that operates in 4HSE. Creating users for the supplier lets them log in, see what has been assigned to them, and produce their own certificates.

This is what makes the approval workflow possible — see [Approvals](/suppliers/approvals/).

## Where you find them

[Section titled “Where you find them”](#where-you-find-them)

Suppliers live at project level, in the **Suppliers** menu. They are also reachable from the **Suppliers** icon on the desktop, which lists all the suppliers you can access across the projects you belong to.

![The Suppliers icon on the desktop](/_astro/supplier-management-0.CHCH-2MQ_DtMGJ.webp)

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