Why suppliers matter
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Suppliers are everyone you buy from or subcontract to. The list lives at company level, so a supplier added on one job is available on all of them. Open it from the Suppliers tile on any page.
What reads from it
Section titled “What reads from it”| Module | Uses suppliers for |
|---|---|
| Price Lists | Whose rates and products a price is |
| BOQ items | Who you intend to buy from |
| Tenders | Who gets invited to price a package |
| Purchase Orders | Who the order goes to, and grouping items into orders |
| Expenses | Who an invoice is from |
| Schedule | Who is doing a task, and who gets called up |
| Defects | Who is notified to fix something |
That is a lot of modules reading one list, which is why the fifteen minutes spent filling in a supplier record properly is repaid many times over.
The one thing worth doing well
Section titled “The one thing worth doing well”File them under their trades.
Suppliers are filed in categories - your trades, such as Plumbing or Tiling & waterproofing - in the Categories section of a supplier’s Details tab. Tenders offers recipients by trade, and the list on the Suppliers page filters by the category tree. If nobody is filed anywhere, choosing who to invite means scrolling through every supplier you have ever used, on every package, forever.
With categories filled in, inviting three roofers takes seconds.
What a good record carries
Section titled “What a good record carries”| Part | Why |
|---|---|
| Name | Their legal name, for orders |
| ABN / ACN | Needed on orders and for your accounts |
| Phone, Email and Address | How to reach them and where they are |
| Contacts | The people you deal with - see below |
| Categories | What they do - drives tender invitations |
| Dates & documents | Insurance and licence expiry dates, with the certificates |
| Ratings | How they perform, on your own scales |
| Note | Anything worth remembering |
Contacts
Section titled “Contacts”A named contact matters more than it sounds. An order to info@ competes with
everything else in a shared mailbox; one to the person who priced your last three
jobs gets actioned.
Keep it current. A contact who left eighteen months ago is the most common reason an order goes nowhere.
Notes are worth keeping
Section titled “Notes are worth keeping”Note is where the working knowledge goes — the things you would otherwise have to remember or ask a colleague:
Good on renovations, not interested in anything under $10k. Ring Steve, do not email. Needs 2 weeks notice minimum. Invoices monthly, 30 days.
That is the difference between a list of businesses and something that helps you run a job.