Notes tagged
procurement
11 notes on procurement. All notes.
One project, many contractors, and the gaps between them
A project split across trades loses most of its time in the handovers between them, not inside any one of them. Where the boundary fails, and what fixes it.
What a work order should say
Read it before you sign it. The clauses that decide whether a job is profitable are rarely the ones anyone reads, and three lines are usually missing.
Quoting a rate you can live with
What actually sits inside a construction rate, the two costs contractors forget, and the conditions that decide whether a quoted rate survives the job.
What a goods receipt note is, and why it is not the challan
The GRN is your own record of what arrived, written by your side. Confuse it with the vendor's challan and you have no independent check on anything.
Three-way matching, and the case it always misses
Order, receipt, invoice. Hold the three against each other before you pay. The method is simple; the failures are all in the cases nobody enumerated.
Retention money is a balance, not a memory
Retention is money you have earned, been billed for, and not been paid. It is held against defects and released later, and most people track it in their heads.
A mobilisation advance is not an advance payment
One is a loan against future work, recovered from every bill. The other is a payment made early. Booking them the same way is how advances get paid twice.
Reconciling a vendor bill against what actually arrived
A vendor's invoice is a claim, not a fact. Checking it is a five-step comparison, and four of the five steps fail for reasons that are not the vendor's fault.
Input tax credit, and why your vendor's filing is your problem
GST credit lets you offset tax paid on purchases against tax you collect. The conditions attached to it are what make vendor discipline a finance function.
Work order or purchase order: which one you are issuing
One buys a thing, the other buys an outcome. The paperwork looks similar and the risk, measurement and payment mechanics are completely different.
Money before material, and how to sign for it honestly
Paying before delivery is normal in construction. What is not normal is a system that hides which payments are advances and which are for goods already in.