Counterparties

Flowtly Editorial Team6 min

The Counterparties module in Flowtly serves as the central registry for all external business entities your organization interacts with, including suppliers, contractors, clients, and partners. It provides a structured way to maintain contact information, tax identifiers, payment terms, and relationship history for each counterparty.

Counterparty groups allow you to categorize your business partners by type, region, industry, or any other classification that supports your reporting and operational needs. Groups make it easy to apply bulk actions, filter views, and generate reports segmented by counterparty category.

CRM enrichment features automatically supplement counterparty profiles with publicly available business data, such as registration details, financial indicators, and branding assets. This reduces manual data entry and helps your team maintain up-to-date, comprehensive records without relying on external research.

Branding health monitoring tracks the completeness and consistency of counterparty branding data, such as logos and trade names, across your records. The duplicate detection and merge capability identifies counterparty records that likely refer to the same entity and provides tools to consolidate them, keeping your database clean and reliable.

Invoice line templates let a counterparty hold the wording its invoice lines are written from, so a contract sentence that repeats every billing period is saved once rather than retyped. See Invoice line templates.

Default project and default budget let a counterparty say where its spending usually belongs, so the answer is offered instead of retyped. Set them on the counterparty, and from then on Flowtly suggests that project and that budget on the counterparty's bank transactions and its incoming cost invoices. They are suggestions, not automatic filing: each one appears alongside the document for you to accept or dismiss, and nothing is attached to a budget or a project until you accept it. Accepting the budget suggestion adds the document to the budget exactly as picking it by hand would.

Two things worth knowing. A counterparty marked budget neutral is never offered a budget — that setting says its transactions are not expected to be filed to a budget, so Flowtly also stops flagging them as missing one, and a suggestion would contradict it. It does not take money out of a budget: a transaction that is already linked to a budget, directly or through a project or contractor the budget includes, still counts there. To keep a transaction out of a budget, remove that link, for example the transaction's project assignment. And a document you have already split across projects is not offered a fresh project, because the split you made is the more specific answer.

A default budget is not the same as listing a counterparty among a budget's contractors. The contractor list is a property of the budget and counts every cost that counterparty ever raised, automatically and retrospectively. The default budget is a property of the counterparty and only ever proposes a single document at a time. You can use either, or both.

A counterparty's currency is its own

Each counterparty carries a currency, and it is the currency you settle with that counterparty in — not the currency a particular document happens to be written in. The two are frequently different and both are correct: a lease can be priced in EUR and paid in PLN at the day's rate. Setting one never changes the other.

When you create a counterparty while reviewing an extracted contract, Flowtly fills this in for you:

  • if the document names a currency, that value is used — it is evidence about this specific agreement
  • otherwise it falls back to your organization's own currency, which is the right answer nearly every time and saves retyping it for every imported document

The field says which of the two happened, so a value Flowtly supplied is never mistaken for one read off the document. Change it and the note goes away. If your organization has no currency configured, the field is simply left blank for you to fill — Flowtly does not guess a currency on your behalf.

See Currencies and exchange rates for how amounts are converted between them.

Country filled in from the tax ID

When you edit a counterparty whose Country is empty, Flowtly fills it in from the tax ID: a Polish NIP without a prefix reads as Poland, and a VAT number with a country prefix, such as DE, names that country. A country that is already set, or one you choose yourself, is never replaced.

Adding a counterparty while you are on a transaction

You do not have to leave a bank transaction to create the counterparty it needs. Open the counterparty field on the transaction and type the name. If nothing matches, an Add counterparty entry appears at the bottom of the list; choosing it opens the usual dialog with the name you typed already filled in, and the Client or Supplier role already set to the one the transaction needs.

Saving attaches the new counterparty to that transaction straight away — there is no second step, and the selection is there when you reopen the transaction.

Note: If the name you typed already belongs to a counterparty that only has the other role, the dialog says so before you save and offers to add the missing role to that record instead. Take it — two records for one company split its history in half, and merging them afterwards is more work than accepting the offer.

A matching tax ID joins the roles for you. When you create a client for a company that Flowtly already holds as a supplier with the same tax ID, the client role is added to that existing counterparty rather than a second record being opened. The party then shows one row carrying both roles, and it appears in both the counterparties list and the suppliers list — where a second record would have hidden the supplier side and made the company look like a client that had never supplied anything. Nothing is merged and no history moves: the existing record simply gains the role it was missing. This is the same outcome the note above asks you to choose by hand, applied automatically when the tax ID leaves no doubt that it is the same company.

Example use cases

  • Register a new supplier and populate their profile with tax ID, payment terms, and contact details.
  • Organize counterparties into groups by region or service type for targeted reporting.
  • Use CRM enrichment to automatically fill in missing business registration data for existing records.
  • Identify and merge duplicate counterparty entries that were created by different team members.
  • Review branding health scores to ensure counterparty logos and names are consistent across documents.
  • Save the contract wording a counterparty requires on its invoice lines, ready to pick when invoicing it.
  • Give a recurring supplier a default project and budget so its monthly invoice arrives with both already proposed.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart ofPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. payment-schedule-line invoiced as invoice. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. contract orders purchase-order-line. purchase-order-line prices position. purchase-order-line estimated against time-entry. budget raises budget-alert. budget covers project. counterparty defaults to budget. counterparty defaults to project. invoice billed from project. set-off-declaration settles invoice. set-off-declaration declared with counterparty. project linked to budget. tenant-turnover reported by counterparty. tenant-turnover compared per area from contract. utilities-statement calculated for contract. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesinvoiced asagreed withattached toorderspricesestimated againstraisescoversdefaults todefaults tobilled fromsettlesdeclared withlinked toreported bycompared per area fromcalculated forbecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent — or, when it went out some other way, recorded as delivered.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule lineOOrder line — One line of a purchase order: a role priced by the hour with the hours estimated for it, or a deliverable priced as an outcome. A deliverable carries no hours at all.Order linePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entryBBudget alert — A notice that a budget has gone off plan - spending over the planned amount, or a margin below the one that was planned. It is raised by a daily check rather than by anyone asking for it.Budget alertPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectSSet-off declaration — A record that your invoices to one counterparty and its cost documents were settled against each other, in amounts that balance exactly. It lowers what remains due on the invoices; it is not a payment.Set-off declarationTTenant turnover — A tenant's reported sales for one month, entered by staff and used for reporting only. An absent figure means not reported, which is a different statement from a reported zero.Tenant turnoverUUtilities statement — One lease's electricity for one month, the kWh its meters recorded times the tariff in force. A draft until finalised, then it never changes; a correction is a new draft.Utilities statementPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal

Related terms