How Archdesk Streamlines Your Procurement Process?

Have you ever felt lost trying to manage projects in your company with different materials from various suppliers and distinct terms of payments or conditions? Who wouldn’t be? That is why today we want to present you one of the solutions from our construction management software - Procurement - that will help organise the orders in your construction company once and for all.

What are The Benefits of Archdesk’s Procurement Solution?

Most important fact: taking care of the procurement process in your company gives you a broad view of your spending. With tracking each purchase, it is easier to state whether your company is still on budget with the project. Also splitting the cost into different categories gives you great information on how much was spent on each of them: design or labour or any other category that you need to control. The cost is an essential feature of each project, that is why it is so crucial to track it in the right way.

But the view over budget and spendings is not the only benefit. Our construction management software supports you with the documentation connected with purchase orders. For example, after the supplier sends the purchase invoice, you can add it in the system. You can then have all documents in one place with access anytime you need.

How does procurement work in Archdesk?

Generally, you can have two types of Purchase Orders:

No matter which type, purchase orders give you detailed information about the order: delivery address, name of the project, project manager responsible for it and more. The information in the order can be customised during the implementation process. However, we want to mention one handy feature. To each order, you can add Terms & Conditions. For example, if you have 15 days to pay your supplier, you can add it in the system. Thanks to that, you will not lose control over deadlines and specific agreements with each supplier.

Approval Process

In the advanced view of the purchase order, you can find another useful feature - an approval process. In the most basic case it consists of:

• Purchase order draft’s acceptance
• Supplier’s approval
• Delivery acceptance
• Last reconciliation

What is important is the fact that the process of approval can be easily customised depending on your needs. For example, we can set that purchase orders above £20,000 must be accepted by the head of a department or that the legal department must approve one of the stages.

Dashboard

All purchases can be seen in a dashboard. It shows us at which stage our order sits, who created it, under which project and the value of it. Except for orders that need to be completed, the system also shows us a dashboard with orders that are ready to be invoiced. There you can see orders in which the purchase invoice value is not equal to the purchase value. Such information is especially useful for the accounting department as it can speed up their processes connected with invoicing.

Budget Control

As mentioned before, the procurement process supports our clients to properly process expenses and keep budget control. Archdesk enables you to keep track of your spend budget automatically on a high-level macro perspective, e.g. materials, labour, or very detailed view, e.g. floor level, room, type of works, supplier etc. When you choose to do it automatically based on a purchase order once it is moved from the draft, not only it is faster and more convenient for you, it is also safer and less exposed to human error.

As you can see, procurement in a construction company is a broad and important topic. It gives control over the specific costs of the project and also shows you the general financial situation of the company. After all, our profits depend on our costs. If you want to check how else our construction management software can support your company - discover other Archdesk features!