Adding your own supplier account

Your own supplier account is what unlocks the parts that matter most: your order status, your shipments, your supplier invoices and your negotiated pricing, wherever the supplier publishes those services. This is the lane Scout marks RECOMMENDED.

Before you enter anything

• You must be the workspace Owner or an Admin.
• Ask Scout to confirm your workspace is approved for real connection before entering credentials. If the setup sheet is marked as a preview, it will produce example replies and you should not type a real password into it.
• Credentials for the supplier's website are not necessarily credentials for its PromoStandards services. Ask the supplier which account and which environment the credentials cover.
• Test-system and production credentials are different. The setup sheet uses the environment Scout has configured; it does not let you pick an environment or override one service. If either is unclear, stop and ask Scout to confirm the boundary first.
• Never email a password to Scout. Never paste one into an Inbox item, a support ticket or a chat. The setup sheet is the only place it belongs.

Step 1 — open the supplier

1. Open Connections → PromoStandards.
2. Open the supplier from Overview, or choose Add supplier and find it.
3. At the Connect step, choose Use your [supplier] account. On a phone this reads Use your account.

Screenshot: the own-account setup sheet.

Step 2 — fill in the setup sheet

If you do not have the login yet, the same panel offers Ask them for credentials — see Getting supplier credentials through Scout. Where credential requests are not yet enabled, the link says so rather than pretending to work.

Step 3 — Test & connect, once

1. Choose Test & connect. Once.
2. The button changes to Connecting… and Scout moves to Checking [supplier] with the subtitle "Asking each published service with your credentials".

What happens to your password: it is submitted through the authorized setup step to the gateway and cleared from the form. Scout does not store it, log it or echo it back. The gateway holds it under your workspace's own separate sub-account so later scheduled reads can use it. Under the fields Scout states it plainly: "Your password is submitted once and cleared from this form."

Do not submit a password repeatedly, and do not keep clicking Check now. Checks consume your workspace's permitted calls and cannot bypass its daily ceiling. If a result is uncertain, let Scout inspect it before you send the password again.

Step 4 — read each service's result

An accepted password is not a guarantee that every service is supported. Read the services one by one:

• Answered — the service replied under your credentials.
• Needs your login — still not authorized for this service.
• These credentials didn't work for [service] — ask [supplier] to enable it. A credential error on one service. Very often the supplier has to switch that specific service on for your account; a new password will not help.
• Not published — the supplier does not offer it. No password fixes an absent service.
• Listed, not available yet — listed by PromoStandards, not wired by the gateway. Ask Scout to look into coverage rather than retrying credentials.
• [Service] didn't answer. You can try again. A provider-side problem.
• Not refreshed today · waiting for quota — the day's calls are spent. Wait for the next eligible check.
• Another import or check is in progress. Check again after it finishes.
• No known product to check yet — inventory and pricing are asked per part or product, and Scout has nothing of yours to ask about yet.

If the check itself stops part-way, use Resume check — it retrieves the same check without repeating a provider call that already completed.

Step 5 — what "queued" means

When credentials and checks are complete, an eligible first import may be queued. The last step of the flow shows First import queued, First import running or First import complete.

Queued is not running, and running is not finished. A diagnostic check by itself is not an order import. Go to History and wait for the actual recorded run and its outcome. If scheduled imports are not enabled for your workspace yet, Scout says "Scheduled imports are not enabled yet" instead of implying a schedule exists.

Step 6 — confirm on Overview

1. Return to Overview.
2. Confirm the supplier's lane, which services are answering, and the time of the last actual check or run.

A supplier can keep shared catalogue access beside its own-account services. Those shared rows still do not mean negotiated or transactional data.

When the supplier changes your password

1. First, confirm with Scout that the connection's configured environment is the one to repair.
2. Open that supplier and choose Update credentials.
3. Run Test & connect once with the replacement.
4. Wait for each service's new result.

If the failure concerns a service-specific override or a different environment, stop and ask Scout. The setup form cannot change those independently, and a supplier-wide update leaves an old override in place.

When you report a problem, tell Scout the supplier and service, the state you can see, roughly when it happened, and your workspace. That is enough for someone to find the protected record without ever needing your secret. Do not send the password in a support request.

Good to know

• A red incident is not repaired by reopening the page, changing a setting or waiting overnight. Scout needs a later valid check or run under the current authority.
• A quota wait is not evidence that the supplier is offline, and an empty successful response is not automatically a failure.
• Scout never writes to a supplier. Purchase orders stay read-only: no placing, no changing, no cancelling.
• You have finished the first connection when the right supplier appears, its lane is clear, each available service has an honest result, and any queued import has a recorded outcome or a clearly explained pending reason.
• A preview can demonstrate all of this. Only an approved live connection and its real recorded runs establish that your supplier is connected.