Third party management

A third party is any person — legal entity or individual — with whom the company has a financial relationship: a supplier who sends invoices, a customer who receives them, a social or tax organization. Simon manages their lifecycle end to end, from automatic identification when a document is imported to the accounting link.

Most of the time, you have nothing to do: the third party is recognized and recorded all by itself when a document is ingested. You only step in in three cases: when Simon cannot identify a counterparty, when several candidates are possible, or when you want to create a customer or supplier ahead of time. You then decide on the third party’s role, the chosen identity, the SIREN and VAT numbers, the address, and the linking to documents.

Role and accounting account

A third party’s role determines the auxiliary account used in its entries. But the account is not fixed by the role alone: it also depends on the payment context, and Simon chooses it automatically at posting.

Situation	Account
Standard supplier invoice	401
Supplier invoice paid by the director	455
Standard customer invoice	411
Customer invoice collected by the director	455
Expense report	471 (suspense account)

A “both” third party switches to 401 or 411 depending on the direction of the document.

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Automatic identification

At ingestion, Simon extracts the counterparty according to the nature of the document: the issuer for a supplier invoice, the recipient for a customer invoice. Expenses, statements and ODs carry none. It then chains a cascade of checks to find — or create — the right third party:

1. By SIREN, if the annotation provides it;
2. by name otherwise, case-insensitive;
3. external verification against the official registers (INSEE for France, VIES for European intra-community VAT);
4. creation or update if nothing matches.

Astuce

When the INSEE verification succeeds, the third party’s name is replaced by the official designation from the register — no more spelling variants of the same supplier.

When the identity is ambiguous

The name search can return several companies. Simon decides based on the number of results: a single candidate is recorded directly; several trigger a soft block, leaving you to choose; no result leads to creating the third party with what is available. The same block occurs when a single candidate is found but its address does not match — Simon compares postal code, city and address lines with a multi-criteria tolerance.

Attention

The VIES service may be momentarily unavailable. In this case, the recording of the third party continues without external validation.

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Creating or modifying a third party by hand

The agent — or you, from the interface — can manage a third party directly. Only the name and the role are mandatory; the SIREN, the VAT number, the country (FR by default), the email, the phone and the address are optional.

Before any creation, Simon looks for a duplicate: exact SIREN match (normalized number + country), then name match (case-insensitive + country). If it finds an existing third party, it reuses it rather than creating a second one.

Attention

A third party referenced by documents cannot be deleted. First reassign or delete the documents concerned.

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The two blocks to know

The first, soft, signals that Simon is hesitating between several third parties or that an address does not match — you select the right one among the candidates. The second, hard, indicates that no third party could be identified for an invoice: since accounts 401 and 411 require one, the document cannot move forward until the third party is created and linked.