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Story Renovations

Purchasing & vendors

What this covers

Section titled “What this covers”

A renovation buys from a lot of people. Materials, fixtures, appliances, 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

Section titled “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.

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.

The vendor view

Section titled “The vendor view”

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 on a renovation 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.

Section titled “Related”