Skip to main content

ProContractor Create a PO from Estimate

One of the Benefits of having an all in one system like ProContractor is the ability to create a PO from the information entered in an estimate. To learn more about ProContractor or other new solutions Viewpoint has to offer, subscribe here and visit viewpoint.com! "ProContractor PO from Estimate. This video is one in a series of videos designed to help you learn helpful tips and tricks you might not know about in ProContractor. To learn more about ProContractor and other Viewpoint solutions, check out Viewpoint's YouTube channel and subscribe to stay up to date on the latest and greatest content. One of the most exciting things about having an all in one system is taking advantage of information that you've already entered into the system and using it again and again and again in other business processes. Today, we're going to look at creating a purchase order from an estimate. If you are using estimating, you have already set the table for all of the materials that are going to be required for a project, the quantities, the pricing. Let's take advantage of that when it comes to the purchasing side. So to do that, I'm going to create a purchase order from the estimate, and a couple of things that I have to do: select my project, select my vendor, and then tell the system which estimate do I want to use to pull the materials and quantities and unit pricing. You can see that's what I did here. I get a list of all of the items in my estimate, and don't worry about all of the data that's sitting in estimating that may be irrelevant when it comes to purchasing because you can take advantage of our filters. You can see I came in here and I filtered this just to include material cost type items from my estimate. I am never going to put labor on a purchase order, right? So come in here, filter these in to make sure that you're seeing only what you want to see. In many cases, a one level filter will not be good enough, right? I have a pretty easy list of materials here. I know that is not always the case, so put in a secondary layer. I told the system that I wanted to bring in a CSI division, right? I only want to see materials for division three. Now I am working on a list that is very, very manageable. From here, I can come in and say, all right, what is it that I want to order? Well, we're going to have to order this concrete, we're going to order some mesh, and let's pull in some of the curing compound, right? We're going to set those lines to purchase, and look at what you're going to gather from this information. I can see very specifically how many as far as quantity is concerned did our estimators estimate that we were going to need of each item. Right? I can see how much is still remaining to be ordered, and these numbers, well initially they will match. The won't always. You can see it looks like I already did a purchase order for some concrete, so if I wanted to put a place in another order, you can see it pre-fills with the remaining quantity. Maybe I don't want 11 cubic yards. For whatever reason, I only want to order five right now. Right? Yes, our estimators thought it was going to be $76 a cubic yard, but we were able to negotiate pricing to bring that down to $75 a cubic yard. Whatever you do here, this is not going to affect your estimate. That estimate is going to contain the pricing and the quantities that were there when that estimate was completed. This just gives you an opportunity to order accordingly. That looks good. I'm feeling great about everything that I'm seeing here. I'm going to tell the system that I want to go ahead and create that purchase order, and let's take a look and see what that looks like. My purchase order is prefilled with all of the vendor information. Let's go to that item detail, and you can see there's the concrete. There's those 15 cubic yards I entered previously, and there it is. I can see that it automatically created that from my estimate, including the actual document, right? There's the output. So very easy to take advantage of the information that was already entered in estimating and flow that through into the accounting process of purchasing materials."