Monitor Your Project Spending Against Budget
Have you ever received an invoice that runs your project over budget? Even if you are diligent about creating POs, this can still happen. Field Materials’ new Spending Report detects such situations and tracks costs against budget in real time. It saves you the stress and headaches of going over budget.
Have you ever received an invoice that you didn’t expect? You received materials months ago but the invoice just came in. Now this invoice puts you over budget and you didn’t expect it.
How You Get Budget Overruns
Most contractors use purchase orders to prevent such situations. Before you place an order with a supplier, you create a purchase order (PO) to commit the cost. The purchase order puts money aside so the invoice won’t surprise you later. However, creating a PO for every single delivery means a lot of data entry for your staff. So, some contractors take shortcuts and simply pre-allocate the total project budget to a single PO. This, however, does not solve the original problem: any new invoice can still surprise you and put you over budget.
Even if you create a PO for every delivery, it does not make you immune from going over budget. To see where you stand with your project budget, you need to generate a report from your accounting software (e.g., Sage, Foundation, CMiC, Viewpoint Vista, Viewpoint Spectrum, Quickbooks, Procore). Contractors usually do this once a week. But a typical project has 5-10 POs per week. By the time you look at the report, you could be well over budget. So, is there a way to detect this in real-time?
How Procurement Software Prevents Budget Overruns
This is where Field Materials software comes in. To track costs against the project budget in real time, we have created a Spending Report. You no longer have to wait for the vendor invoices or for the report from your accounting software! As soon as you place an order, the Spending Report will show in real time committed costs against your budget. Field Materials tracks pre-negotiated prices as well as prices saved from the previous orders. It automatically computes the sales tax for accurate order totals. View the breakdown of costs by materials and vendors and click on any one of them to see all the associated orders. Track spending against your budget allowances or your original estimates from OnScreen Takeoff, AccuBid, BlueBeam, Stack, PlanSwift, or Edge. Finally, download the report as an Excel file – it’s all at your fingertips!
