One of Aspire’s main purposes is to help you accurately cost your work. Basic job costing is accurately accounting for direct costs, like Material and Labor, against your gross revenue. 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:
👷 You can measure crew performance on a daily basis.
🤑 It 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!
Benefits of using the Purchasing module
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. Here are some additional benefits:
Using Purchasing in Aspire can contribute to your bottom line by giving you and your team a reliable process to follow. With a well-defined purchasing process and Aspire’s features, 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.
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.
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.
The Purchasing Assistant allows you to bulk purchase items for multiple opportunities at the same time, saving you from repetitive work.
You can maintain strong vendor relationships by ensuring timely payments and tracking vendor response times for efficient order fulfillment.
Purchasing workflow
Watch this video or keep reading to learn about the purchasing workflow in Aspire.
Estimate – When you create the estimate for an opportunity, you identify materials and associated quantities required for the work. When you win the opportunity; work order, or contract, Aspire creates work tickets and makes the material purchases available in the Purchasing Assistant screen to help create purchase receipts.
Review/schedule work ticket – Once Aspire has created the work tickets, you can schedule visits to complete the work from the Scheduling screen.
Plan purchases – The Purchasing Assistant screen guides you through making purchase receipts for vendor orders by displaying a list of items needed from work tickets.
Commit to purchases – From the Purchase Receipt screen, you can email or print and then send purchase receipts to vendors for fulfillment.
Receive purchases – As ordered materials are received from vendors, you can record the item receipts on the Purchase Receipt screen.
Approve purchases – As vendors send you invoices for items that have been received, you can approve vendor payment.
The Purchasing module
The Purchasing module has four tabs. Each of these tabs is a list, and like most other lists, you can use the usual filter, display, sort, and group actions and save your selections as saved searches.
Purchasing Assistant
This tab lists all the estimated items from won opportunities that need to be purchased. When using the Purchasing Assistant to create a receipt, the branch, vendor, item, and job are automatically populated which saves you from manual data entry. Learn more in our article about creating purchase receipts.
Purchase Receipts
This tab is where you create and track records of materials you received or will receive from vendors. Learn more in our article about purchase receipt management.
Inventory
When you purchases materials, Aspire lets you purchase those items directly to a job or a job inventory. You can also purchase items to inventory locations for later job allocation.
The Inventory tab is where you add and manage Inventory Locations like warehouses, outbuildings, and yards. Learn more in our article about using inventory locations.
Daily Plan Report
This tab lets you view and manage the items needed for a day of work and account for items delivered during a visit in Aspire and in Crew Mobile. Learn more in our article about using the Daily Plan report.
Now you know the basics of the Purchasing module! Keep reading the articles in this section to learn more.