Import vendors and POs from your ERP

The Spend API enables you to import vendor records and purchase orders from your ERP into Airwallex. This allows your organization to manage Accounts Payable workflows in Airwallex while keeping vendor and PO data in sync with your source system.

Target audience

This use case applies to:

• Organizations that manage vendor records and purchase orders in an ERP system and want to mirror them in Airwallex.
• Finance teams adopting Airwallex for bill payments while maintaining their existing ERP as the system of record for vendors and POs.
• Developers building bidirectional sync between Airwallex Spend and an ERP platform.

Systems involved

• Your ERP or accounting system: Source of truth for vendor records, purchase orders, and accounting data (chart of accounts, tax rates, custom fields).
• Airwallex Spend: Receives vendor and PO data for use in Accounts Payable workflows, bill creation, and payment processing.

Expected outcome

After integration, your system:

• Creates vendor records in Airwallex that mirror your ERP.
• Creates purchase orders with line items mapped to your chart of accounts and tax rates via external IDs.
• Keeps vendor and PO records synchronized as changes occur.

Prerequisites

Before starting this integration, you need to:

1. Set up custom accounting data: Import your chart of accounts, tax rates, and custom fields into Airwallex with external IDs that match your ERP. See Set up custom accounting data.
2. Retrieve legal entity IDs: Obtain legal entity IDs from the Retrieve account details API API for vendor association.

Integration flow

The typical integration follows this sequence:

1. Import accounting data: Set up your chart of accounts, tax rates, and custom fields in Airwallex with external IDs that match your ERP system.
2. Retrieve legal entity IDs: Call the Retrieve account details API to get the legal entity IDs for your organization.
3. Ingest vendors: For each vendor in your ERP, create it in Airwallex using POST /api/v1/spend/vendors/create with the relevant legal entity IDs.
4. Ingest purchase orders: For each PO in your ERP, prepare line items with accounting field selections using external IDs, then create the PO in Airwallex using POST /api/v1/spend/purchase_orders/create linked to the appropriate vendor.
5. Poll resources: Call the List Vendors endpoint or List Purchase Orders endpoint with optional filters.
6. Ongoing sync: Monitor for changes to vendors and POs and update the corresponding sync_status in Airwallex via the sync endpoints.
7. Error handling: Monitor for possible sync failures and call the Update sync status endpoints with custom error messages to display in Airwallex.

See also

To implement this use case, refer to:

• How-to guides:
  • Set up custom accounting data
  • Vendors via API
  • Purchase orders via API
  • Bills via API