Suppliers and Costs

Suppliers and Costs

The Suppliers section of Dotify allows you to centrally manage all the digital service providers you work with, track associated costs, and distribute them among your clients. This module is essential for having a clear view of the operating expenses of your agency or freelance business.

Supplier Management

Supplier Data

For each supplier, you can record the following information:

Credential Security: all credentials saved in Dotify are encrypted before being stored in the database. This ensures that, even in the event of unauthorized access to the data, credentials remain unreadable. Only authorized users in your organization can view them in plain text.

Visual Customization

Each supplier can be visually customized for better organization:

• Custom color: assign a distinctive color to each supplier. This color will be used in list views and associated deadlines, making the supplier immediately recognizable at a glance.
• Custom ordering: reorder suppliers according to your preferences via drag & drop, placing the ones you use most frequently at the top.

Default Supplier

You can set a default supplier that will be automatically selected when you create a new deadline. This feature is particularly useful if most of your services are concentrated with a single provider (for example, your main hosting provider).

To set a supplier as the default, access the supplier list and use the appropriate option in the desired supplier’s menu.

Association with Deadlines

Suppliers can be directly associated with your clients’ deadlines. When you create or edit a deadline (such as a domain or hosting renewal), you can select the corresponding supplier. This allows you to:

• Immediately know which supplier a particular service is active with
• Quickly access the supplier’s credentials from the deadline card
• Filter deadlines by supplier, to get an overview of active services with each provider
• Evaluate overall costs per supplier

Shared Costs

One of the most powerful features of the suppliers module is shared cost management. Many digital services (servers, software licenses, CDN, monitoring tools) are used across multiple clients. With shared costs you can:

How They Work

1. Create a shared cost: define the total cost of the service and the associated supplier.
2. Allocate the cost: distribute the cost across multiple clients and/or deadlines, specifying the share for each, either as a percentage or absolute value.
3. Monitor: Dotify will automatically calculate the breakdown and show you how much each client contributes to the overall cost of the service.

Practical example: you have a dedicated server that costs €120/month and hosts the websites of 4 clients. You can create a shared cost and allocate €30 to each client, or different percentages based on the resources used (e.g., 40%, 30%, 20%, 10%).

Cost Frequency

Each cost, whether individual or shared, can have one of the following recurrence frequencies:

Tip: use cost frequency to get an accurate forecast of your business’s recurring expenses. In the dashboard, you can view aggregated monthly, quarterly, and annual costs to plan your budget precisely.

Best Practices

• Register all suppliers: even those with free services. Having a complete list helps you maintain control of all the tools you use.
• Update credentials: when you change a password with a supplier, also update it in Dotify to avoid discrepancies.
• Use colors consistently: assign similar colors to suppliers in the same category (e.g., shades of blue for hosting, green for email services).
• Review costs periodically: check shared costs at least once per quarter to ensure allocations are still accurate.