Purchasing & vendors

What this covers

A job buys from a lot of people. Materials, fixtures, equipment and trade labor all come from separate counterparties on separate terms. This area is how those commitments get written down before the money moves.

Purchase orders

A purchase order is issued to a vendor and carries line items with quantities and prices. Every line is coded to the project and to a cost code.

That coding does two jobs at once. The vendor gets an unambiguous statement of what has been ordered and at what price. The project gets the commitment on its books the day the order goes out, rather than weeks later when an invoice arrives. Issued orders are what appear as committed cost in budgets and cost control — the difference between what a job has planned to spend and what it has already promised.

A purchase order can be changed after it is issued by writing a change order against it. Both the original and its changes show on the commitments tab in Cost Control, so the committed figure is the current obligation to that vendor rather than the amount first ordered.

Documents stay open after an order is issued. Quotes, signed copies and other files can be added to or managed on a purchase order or a purchase order change order after it is issued or approved. The line items stay locked; changing what was ordered still takes a change order.

When the invoice follows, it carries the same job and cost coding as the order behind it, so the two describe the same piece of work in the same terms.

Archiving an order

An order that is no longer needed can be archived rather than deleted, at any status — including one already approved. Archiving takes a note saying why, and it stops the order counting as committed cost against the project: the commitments tab in Cost Control no longer includes it. A change order written against a purchase order can be archived on its own the same way.

The record itself stays. Archived orders sit on an Archived tab on the purchase order page with their notes, can be opened in full, and can be brought back if the decision changes — an archived order has to be unarchived before it can be edited again. Deleting would lose the history; archiving is for the case where the order was real but should no longer weigh on the budget. Ordering from the wrong subcontractor is the common one, but so is an approved order the job ends up not needing.

The vendor view

Vendors receive purchase orders in the Vendor Portal as well as by email, and approve both the order and any changes written against it there. That is all the portal does today; treat anything beyond purchase orders and their changes as not built.

A supplier or trade sees their own document: the lines addressed to them, the quantities and prices agreed, and the attachments that go with it.

It is scoped to exactly that. A vendor sees the order written to them — not the project budget, not the client’s contract, and not another vendor’s pricing. This is deliberate. Most counterparties need one document and none of the rest, and a purchase order is a cleaner thing to send than a login to a system full of other people’s commercial terms. :::

Related

• Part 4 §13.2 — Financials — the module this page describes, in the guide
• Budgets and cost control — where committed cost is tracked
• Billing and accounting — how vendor invoices are coded to the job
• Feature matrix — the two side by side
• Glossary — Cost Code, Commitment, Purchase Order