One record for every factory, contractor, mill, dye house and printer you pay. Contacts, terms, workers comp and garment registration expiry, linked straight to vendor POs, cut tickets, production stages and contractor payments.
A growing brand ends up with a cutting service, two sewing contractors, a wash house, an embroiderer, a mill in one country and a trim supplier in another. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet of who does what, a folder of registration certificates, and a person who knows which contractor still has your fabric. AIMS360 puts that on one record and connects it to the purchase orders, cut tickets, production stages and payments that involve them.
Apparel uses this word three ways and they point in different directions, so it is worth being blunt about which one this page means.
| When someone says vendor | They can mean | Where that lives |
|---|---|---|
| Your factories and contractors | The people you pay to make your goods, plus the mills and trim suppliers you buy materials from. | This page. Money going out. |
| You, to a retailer | Vendor compliance, vendor portals, routing guides, labeling rules, chargebacks. You are their vendor. | EDI and the retailer connections directory. Money coming in. |
| A software company | ERP vendors, the people selling you systems. Common in buying guides and comparison articles. | Not a record in your ERP at all. |
Vendor management in AIMS360 is the first one: a contractor or factory your company pays for services to produce goods, or a supplier you buy raw materials from. Full package factories, cut and sew contractors, dye houses, screen printers, embroiderers, mills and trim suppliers are all vendors. Each gets one record, and that record is used everywhere that vendor turns up in your business.
Deliberately not complicated. The value is not in the fields, it is in the fact that everything else points at them.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Vendor code | Five characters, letters or numbers. Short because you will type it constantly, on purchase orders, cut tickets and payments. |
| Contact details | The company, the people, the addresses. One place, so the person raising a PO and the person chasing a delivery are calling the same number. |
| Terms | How and when you pay them, carried through to the purchase orders and billing that follow. |
| Workers compensation | Reference detail for production contractors, kept with the contractor rather than in a folder. |
| Garment registration number and expiry | For US production contractors. The expiration date is the useful half: it turns a certificate you filed once into something you can actually see coming. |
These are not settings, they are just the shapes of relationship that show up. One company often fills more than one row.
| Vendor | What they do for you | What you raise against them |
|---|---|---|
| Full package factory | Sources the materials and delivers finished garments at a per unit price. You buy the product, not the labor. | A production purchase order. |
| Cut make trim contractor | You own the fabric and trims. They cut, make and trim, and charge for the work. | A cut ticket, with the bill of materials issued to it. |
| Single operation contractor | Just cutting, or just sewing, or just finishing. Common once volume grows and one shop cannot hold it all. | A stage inside production tracking, with its own rate. |
| Dye house or laundry | Dyes or washes goods after they are sewn. | A garment dye job. See blanks to finished goods. |
| Printer or embroiderer | Screen print, heat transfer, embroidery, embellishment. | Also a garment dye job, because the mechanic is the same. |
| Mill or trim supplier | Sells you fabric, thread, buttons, labels, polybags. | A materials purchase order, received by lot and roll. |
Every vendor purchase order for finished goods or raw materials points at the vendor, carrying their terms and contacts into the order.
The contractor on a cut is the vendor record, which is what makes contractor tracking and contractor payment possible later without re-keying anyone.
Each stage of a tracked run carries its own vendor, so a garment cut here, sewn there and washed somewhere else has three named vendors on one job.
Garment dye jobs carry a primary vendor, and where stages are tracked, each process step can go to a different one.
Contractor payments post against the vendor, and vendor PO billing flows into accounts payable and your accounting.
Fabric and trims received from a mill stay linked to the order and the vendor, tracked by lot, roll and location through the bill of materials.
When contractor tracking runs alongside cut tickets, payments post against the contractor contracts and receipts, so what you owe and what you have paid is a record rather than a memory. Pick the contractor, see their open items, enter the payment reference, and confirm the amount per line. Full payment is assumed unless you change it, which is the common case and saves typing.
The contractor statement is the document that ends arguments. It prints open items only when you want a clean list of what is outstanding, or includes payment detail when someone wants the full history. A cut paid in full drops off, so the statement stays about what is live rather than growing forever.
This matters more than it sounds. Contractor relationships in apparel run on trust and short memories, and the month you cannot reconcile what you paid against what they cut is the month a good contractor starts prioritising someone else's work.
US garment contractors register with their state labor authority, and in California that registration has to be renewed. AIMS360 holds the registration number and its expiration date on the contractor's vendor record, next to everything else about them.
The reason to bother has changed in recent years. California's Garment Worker Protection Act, SB 62, took effect on 1 January 2022. It defines a brand guarantor as anyone contracting for garment manufacturing, and makes them jointly and severally liable with their manufacturers and contractors for unpaid wages, penalties and attorney's fees. It also requires four years of records, including:
| What the law requires kept | Where that already sits in AIMS360 |
|---|---|
| Contracts, invoices, purchase orders, work and job orders | Vendor purchase orders and cut tickets, against the vendor. |
| Style and cut sheets | The style record and the cut ticket it was produced on. |
| Contract worksheets showing the unit price agreed with each contractor | The rates carried on cut tickets and production stages. |
| A copy of the garment license of each registered contractor | The registration number and expiry on the vendor record. |
Read that list and notice what it is. It is your vendors, your purchase orders, your cut tickets and your payment history. A brand keeping those in email threads and a filing cabinet is carrying a real risk. A brand running them in one system already has most of it in one place, organised by the contractor it belongs to.
SB 62 detail above is drawn from the bill text and California Labor Commissioner guidance, reviewed August 2026. Requirements change; confirm current obligations with your own advisor.
Four things buyers reasonably expect from the phrase that are not in here.
There is no sourcing marketplace and no supplier directory. AIMS360 manages the vendors you already work with. Finding new ones is still trade shows, agents and referrals.
No audit scheduling, no corrective action plans, no factory scores or social compliance workflows. If you run an audit program, it lives in a tool built for that.
The registration number and expiry are what you typed. AIMS360 does not check them against a state registry or warn you that a licence lapsed last week.
Routing guides, labeling specs, ASN rules and chargebacks are the other direction entirely. That is EDI, and it has its own cluster of pages.
What brands ask about managing factories, contractors and suppliers.
A contractor or factory your company pays for services to produce goods, or a supplier you buy raw materials from. Factories, cut and sew contractors, dye houses, printers, embroiderers, mills and trim suppliers are all vendors. It is the money going out, not the money coming in.
Direction. Vendor management is about the suppliers you pay to make your goods. Vendor compliance is about you as a supplier to a retailer, meaning their routing guides, labeling rules, EDI documents and chargebacks. Both matter to an apparel brand, but they are opposite ends of the business and they live in different parts of AIMS360.
A five character vendor code, contact details and terms. For production contractors it also holds reference details worth having in one place, including workers compensation information and the garment registration number with its expiration date.
Yes, and most do. The same shop might cut for you on one style, sew for you on another and finish a third. One vendor record is used wherever they appear, on the purchase order, on the cut ticket, on individual production tracking stages and on the payments you post.
The garment registration number and its expiration date sit on the contractor's vendor record, so the date is where the contractor is rather than in a separate spreadsheet. AIMS360 stores what you enter. It does not check the number against any state registry or tell you whether a registration is currently valid.
Indirectly, by holding the records in one place. California's Garment Worker Protection Act, effective 1 January 2022, requires four years of contracts, invoices, purchase orders, work and job orders, style and cut sheets, contract worksheets showing agreed unit prices, and a copy of each registered contractor's garment license. Most of that is your vendor records, purchase orders, cut tickets and payment history. AIMS360 is not a compliance product, does not file or verify registrations, and nothing here is legal advice.
When contractor tracking is used with cut tickets, payments can be posted against the contractor contracts and receipts, so you can see what is owed and what has been paid to each contractor. The contractor statement prints open items only, or includes payment detail, and a cut paid in full drops off the statement.
Yes. In production tracking each stage carries its own vendor, so a run cut in one place, sewn in another and washed in a third stays one visible thread. A stage can also be left without a preferred vendor when the work goes to whoever has capacity that week.
Yes. Vendor purchase order billing is part of the QuickBooks sync, covering QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise, so the purchase the warehouse received is the purchase accounting sees without re-keying, and it flows into accounts payable from there.
No. There is no sourcing marketplace and no supplier discovery, so AIMS360 will not find you a factory. There is also no social compliance audit module, meaning no audit scheduling, corrective action plans or factory scores. It manages the vendors you already work with and the money and goods moving between you.
For contractors, the contractor statement shows what is owed and what has been paid per contractor. For purchased goods and materials, vendor purchase order billing flows through to accounting, so spend by vendor is reported where your payables live rather than being reconstructed from paperwork.
Yes. Mills and trim suppliers are vendors like any other. Materials purchase orders are raised against them, received materials are tracked by lot, roll and location, and the same vendor record carries the contacts and terms behind those orders.
Last reviewed 19 August 2026 by the AIMS360 team. AIMS360 capabilities described here, including the vendor record with its five character code, contacts, terms, workers compensation and garment registration details, vendors used across purchase orders, cut tickets, production tracking stages and garment dye jobs, contractor payment posting and contractor statements, and vendor purchase order billing through the QuickBooks sync, reflect the vendor and contractor workflow as documented in the AIMS360 support knowledge base. California SB 62 details are drawn from the bill text and Labor Commissioner guidance and are provided for context only; this page is not legal advice and AIMS360 is not a compliance product. Your own configuration is set during implementation.
Whatever shape it is in, spreadsheet, inbox or somebody's head. We will set a few of them up, put a cut ticket and a purchase order against them, and show you the statement at the end of it.
