How Clover works
Clover connects a buying organization with its suppliers and replaces scattered emails and attachments with structured, tracked information. Instead of chasing a certificate or a price update over email, you send a request that arrives as a defined piece of work, gets completed in the system, and leaves a record.
If you understand one chain of ideas, the rest of Clover follows from it:
Companies connect → each company keeps a profile built from fields → simple facts are single custom fields, while richer things (a purchase order, a product, a chargeback) are business process objects — the same idea at greater complexity → an admin builds a workflow to collect or update that data → sending the workflow to a connected company creates a task → and who can see and do what is controlled throughout.
Everything else you'll use — conversations, files, products, reporting, dashboards, campaigns — sits on top of that chain.
Companies and connections
In Clover, the account that matters is your company, and the relationship that matters is a connection between two companies. A connection is established by invitation: one company invites another, and once it's accepted the two are connected.
The connection is what makes collaboration possible. Before you're connected, a company can see only your public information. After you connect, more of your profile becomes available, you can assign tasks to each other, and you can share business data. Connections live at the company level, so everyone at a connected company benefits.
See Connections and the network.
Your company profile
Every company has a profile, and it's layered. Public information is visible to anyone on Clover — your name, website, and other identifying details. Private information stays hidden until you've connected with a partner, and even then you control what you share. This layering lets a company be discoverable without exposing private details to everyone; the connection is the key that unlocks the deeper layer.
From custom fields to business process objects
A profile is built from fields. The simplest is a single custom field — a yes/no flag like "Accepts drop-ship orders," or a text value. But a lot of business data is bigger and more structured than one field: a purchase order, an invoice, a product, a chargeback. Clover represents those as business process objects (BPOs).
A BPO and a custom field are the same idea at different scales: a company defining data about itself or its trading partners in a defined shape, then working with instances of that shape. A custom field is the small end; a BPO — with many fields, its own views, and stages it moves through — is the rich end. Products are themselves BPOs, and a new BPO usually starts from a template Clover provides.
Workflows and tasks
A workflow is a reusable template for a business process — collecting insurance documents, onboarding a vendor, updating product specs. An administrator builds it once and publishes it, after which it's available to the teams it's shared with, or across the whole organization. A workflow targets a kind of data — a company, a product, or another business object — and exposes its fields so they can be collected or updated.
A task is Clover's work-distribution mechanism: an instance of a workflow, completed (or not) by an assignee. Every task comes from a workflow, which is why tasks are consistent and trackable. The recipient works through its steps — reading instructions, filling in a form (often pre-filled from their profile, product data, or another business object), uploading a file, or signing — and the response returns to the sender. Tasks can carry a due date, and a campaign sends one workflow to many connected companies at once.
A task is assigned to a specific person or to a department — never to an internal team, and the difference is worth understanding. A team is a company's own name for a group that does similar work; a department is a standardized name Clover shares across all companies (Finance, Customer Support, and so on). That standardization is the point: it lets a buyer assign work to "Finance" and have it reach the right group at every partner, even though one company calls that group AP/AR and another calls it Accounting. When a task goes to a department, everyone in it at the receiving company is notified, and one member claims it to respond.
See Workflows and tasks.
Who sees what
Access in Clover is deliberate, and it's worth separating two things people often conflate:
- Workflow visibility decides who can open a workflow and create tasks from it (and which fields they see). It's set per workflow, by team or organization-wide.
- Task visibility is separate. Everyone at the receiving company can see a task sent to them; on the sending side, who sees it follows the workflow's access. But only the assignee can respond — and a department task must be claimed first.
What a partner sees of your profile depends on your connection and what you've shared. And throughout, a person's role, team, and department membership shape what they can see and do. The point is that access is managed in the right place — the connection, the workflow, the record — and applied consistently.
See Understanding visibility and access.
Buyers and suppliers
Clover serves two sides of the same relationship, and your experience depends on which side you're on.
- A buying organization sets things up: it builds workflows, assigns tasks and campaigns, configures dashboards for its suppliers, and analyzes results in reporting.
- A supplier responds: it completes the tasks it receives, uploads files, keeps its profile current, and works from the dashboard its customer configured. Suppliers don't author workflows or run reports — their world is task-centric by design.
Because of this, Clover tailors what each person sees. You may not see every feature described here, and that's expected.
Where to go next
- New supplier? Start with Respond to your first task.
- Setting up as an admin? See Workflows and tasks and Business process objects.