eProcureAI / Platform / Construction and facilities
IndustryIf the job and cost code are not captured when somebody orders, they get allocated afterwards by whoever can remember. Capturing them at source is what makes job costing survive contact with a live site.
Built for sites. Requesting and receiving both work from a phone in a yard.
Every construction business runs job costing. Most of them run it retrospectively, which is why the numbers are always slightly wrong.
Somebody on site orders materials. The job is obvious to them and invisible to everybody else. Weeks later a finance team allocates the invoice to a job based on the date, the supplier and a phone call to whoever might remember. Some of those allocations are wrong, and nobody finds out.
The consequence is not academic. Job margins are the number the business runs on, and if a proportion of cost lands on the wrong job then every margin figure is quietly inaccurate.
The person ordering knows the job. They know it with certainty, at that moment, and never again with the same confidence. Capturing job and cost code on the request is the entire fix, provided requesting is quick enough to happen from a site.
The second failure is subcontractor insurance. It gets checked at onboarding and then never again, so a certificate that expired in March goes unnoticed until an incident makes it extremely relevant. Tracking it to the date and blocking new orders when it lapses removes the exposure without anybody maintaining a spreadsheet.
Job and cost code selected at the point the person actually knows them, on a phone, in whatever conditions a site provides.
Subcontractor insurance and certifications checked as current before anything is committed, rather than at onboarding only.
The job budget is checked and the value committed at approval, so a project manager sees the real position rather than the invoiced one.
Received by the crew, on a phone, with shortages recorded where the pallet lands rather than reconstructed later.
Because the code was captured at the start, no allocation exercise is needed and rebilling is straightforward.
A request form designed for a desk does not get used on a site. It gets postponed, then done from memory, then coded wrongly.
A project manager needs to know what the job has committed, not what it has been invoiced for. Those two numbers differ by weeks and by a great deal of money.
Insurance verified at onboarding and never again is a genuine exposure. Tracking every certificate to its expiry removes it without anybody keeping a list.
Four patterns, all of which disappear when the code is captured at the request.
| Pattern | What happens | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Allocated after the fact | Finance assigns a job based on date and supplier | A proportion land on the wrong job, silently |
| Split deliveries | One order serving two jobs, coded to one | One job carries cost that belongs to another |
| Site consumables | General materials with no obvious job | Either overhead or an arbitrary allocation |
| Variations | Extra work ordered verbally, coded to the base job | Variation margin disappears into the original scope |
Splitting a purchase across two jobs is handled at the request, which removes the most common source of allocation error.
The exposure everybody knows about and the one most often out of date on site.
Contractual as much as legal, and rarely re-checked after onboarding.
Attached to the request rather than chased by email during mobilisation.
Tracked against the order so the final position is not a negotiation from memory.
Routed for approval when they cross a threshold rather than absorbed silently.
Held on the supplier record and applied automatically rather than remembered.
Job costing only works if the code is captured by the person who knows it, at the moment they know it.
Order what the job needs and confirm what arrived. Both from a phone, in under two minutes.
Carries the code through, checks cover, and keeps the job position current.
We will trace where the allocation broke and show what capturing the code at the request would have changed.
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