Table of Contents
Purpose
One of Aspire’s primary purposes is to provide you the ability to accurately cost your work. Basic job costing is accurately accounting for direct costs, like Material and Labor, against your gross revenue.
💡 Tip: While labor costs are tracked in real time using Aspire’s mobile apps, material costs can be tracked in real time using the Purchasing module.
Job Costing is important because:
👷Accurate job costing allows you to measure crew performance on a daily basis.
🤑Job costing feeds your gross profit.
🎯Sharing gross profit targets and gross profit actuals is proven to be an effective technique that top performing companies practice every day!
Using the Purchasing module in Aspire can streamline and enhance your organization's buying process. You can benefit from accurate job costing, earned revenue tracking, and real-time inventory counts.
With this information, Aspire then provides valuable data on where your dollars are being spent and helps with budgeting and financial planning.
It also helps you maintain strong vendor relationships by ensuring timely payments and tracking vendor response times for efficient order fulfillment.
Using the Purchasing Assistant to Your Advantage
You might find yourself asking: “Why would the purchasing assistant make my daily processes easier?” or “Why can’t I just make purchase receipts manually?”
The Purchasing Assistant in Aspire shows you all the estimated items from won opportunities you need to be purchased.
Did you know? 🧠
You can also make bulk purchases and allocate items to inventory!
In the Purchasing Assistant, you can also filter to see what needs to be ordered, and filter out what has already been ordered.
Creative list building in the Purchasing Assistant allows you to filter needed items by Work Ticket, Item Type, Branch, Property and Scheduled Date. You can even include Estimator Notes to be visible on this list!
📌Note: Filtering by Item Name gives you the ability to order duplicate items for multiple tickets from the same vendor at the same time.
The Purchasing Assistant allows you to bulk purchase items for multiple opportunities at the same time. From the Bulk Action menu you can purchase materials in bulk and possibly receive bulk discounts from vendors, you can bulk remove items, or allocate items towards work tickets.
Purchasing for Multiple Opportunities at Once
To purchase for multiple opportunities you would select all of the work tickets that you are ordering for, then from the Bulk Actions menu, select Create Purchase.
🧠Remember you can purchase for multiple opportunities but you can only have one purchase receipt per vendor.
Where Can I Create Purchase Receipts?
In Aspire, you have multiple options to create purchase receipts, depending on your team’s different workflows:
While you can create purchase receipts directly from the Purchase Receipts tab or from a work ticket on the work ticket list, there are other methods to streamline your process.
From the Schedule Board
One method is creating a purchase receipt directly from the schedule board. Simply right-click on the desired job, and you can create a purchase receipt, saving you time and effort.
From the Purchasing Assistant
When using the Purchasing Assistant to create the receipt, the benefit is that the branch, vendor, item, and job are automatically populated which saves you from manual data entry.
To minimize manual data entry, it is recommended to use the Purchasing Assistant as much as possible when creating purchase receipts.
By using this feature, you can streamline the process and ensure accurate and comprehensive information is carried over, reducing the potential for errors and saving valuable time.
From the Quick Menu
Another option to create a purchase receipt is through the Quick Menu located in the blue side menu. When you use the Quick Menu you will start with a blank receipt.
This allows you to create a purchase receipt from scratch, providing flexibility when needed.
Workflow of a Purchase Receipt
From beginning to end, the workflow of a Purchase Receipt will usually follow these statuses:
New ▶️ Received ▶️ Approved ▶️Complete
You start by creating your purchase, then confirm items have arrived, approve the invoice, and ensure everything is recorded in your accounting system.
To better understand this process, the below table outlines each status and what it means to you.
Purchasing Status | Meaning |
New | When you’re in the New status, it means you’re at the beginning stages of a purchase.
The purchase receipt has been created either from a work ticket or manually.
You’re either working on finalizing what you need to buy, asking for quotes from different suppliers, or waiting for the items you ordered to arrive. |
Received | Once the items have arrived, you need to confirm that you’ve received them in order for the items to go to a job or inventory.
This is done in Aspire by clicking on the Receive option from the three dot options menu at the top of the page. |
Approved | After you’ve received the items, you’ll get an invoice from the vendor saying how much you owe.
If everything on the invoice is correct and you’re ready to pay, you’ll click on Approve from the three dot options menu at the top of the page.
This tells the system that you’ve reviewed the invoice and agree with it, signaling that you’re ready to make the payment. |
Complete | This status only applies to companies that have integrated Aspire with their accounting system and indicate that the purchase receipt has been properly sent to your accounting system. |
Financial Benefits of Using Purchasing in Aspire
Using Purchasing in Aspire can contribute to your bottom line. Your purchasing process is not very different from other processes your team follows each day.
When processes are not followed, a downward spiral can happen very quickly. The same holds true for Purchasing! With a well-defined purchasing process and using the tools in Aspire, your company will have:
📈 Benchmarks that can be tracked and used for performance standards.
📊Critical data for financial decisions like budgets and estimates.
🔎A centralized process where all required purchase information is found in one place.
💰The ability to reduce your direct costs and improve efficiencies.
Using Data for Financial Decisions
As you get to know Aspire, you begin to realize that the data you enter is organized to allow you to evaluate and act upon the information to make good leadership decisions.
Purchasing in Aspire produces accurate data associated with real estimates and work tickets. This data is valuable to your financial team as they forecast budgets each year. Then, your cost projections can be reported, evaluated, and used with confidence.
In order to take the guessing out of the budgeting process, perform your purchasing in Aspire every day. Purchase and allocate materials to the projects and divisions where they belong!
Here’s an example of how this could help you:
Before you used Aspire, your estimating process for enhancement work included multiplying your material costs by a factor of 2.5 which included a material markup and your costs for labor.
This means a 2” maple tree that costs $100, you would install for $250.
However, a 2” oak tree that cost you $150, you bid to install at $375. Each type of 2” tree takes the same amount of time to install but the oak tree price may now be inflated in your proposal.
Saving Costs and Improving Efficiencies With Layouts
Using the Purchasing module can save your company time, money, and effort!
For example: If you had a plant delivery with multiple different item types on it for multiple jobs, what’s better than providing your team a detailed Purchase Receipt that tells them exactly what is needed for each job and reduces guesswork?
Using Aspire’s Detail Purchase Receipt Layouts can help you provide more guidance for your teams that aren’t working behind the computer! Each morning, your crews have the materials they need, reducing the wasted fuel and labor costs to get their supplies.
When your crews are taken out of the purchasing process, they can focus on performing their primary tasks. This means there are more billable hours performed every day!
📑To learn more about Purchase Receipt Layouts, click here!