Purchase orders
The receipt gets home even when the tech doesn’t
It works the same whether ServiceProof holds the purchase order or your own system of record does — start where you are.
Your tech is at the supply house counter with a part in one hand. In under a minute they raise a purchase order against the job, get a real PO number from your own numbering, photograph the paperwork, and purchasing knows about it before they’re back in the truck.
This is a module. The field half — raise a PO at the counter, photograph the receipt — works against the purchasing you already run. The office half, receiving and van stock, is there when you want it and not before.
Raise it at the counter
Ask any owner where the money leaks and “supply house runs” comes up fast.
A tech buys a part on the company account. The paperwork goes in a door pocket. Three weeks later the invoice arrives at the office and nobody can say which job it belongs to — so it gets absorbed, and the job you thought made money didn’t.
- The PO is raised against the job, from the job. The link exists from the first second.
- A real purchase order number from your own numbering, allocated properly — not a placeholder to reconcile later.
- The number is held on screen with a copy button, so the tech can read it to the counter staff.
- They can only raise it against their own open work — which stops consumables being charged to a job that closed last month.
Raised against the job it’s for.
A real PO number, on the spot.
Your supply houses, already loaded
- Your supplier list, with branches — not just “Ferguson” but which Ferguson.
- Search by name; the right branch is two taps away.
- Tap the phone number to call the counter. Tap the address for directions.
- Notes on the PO for anything the warehouse needs to know.
Getting the branch right matters at month end, when somebody is matching statements from six locations of the same supplier.
The right branch, not just the right company.
The branch, its people, and your terms.
Read it back before it’s real.
Photograph the paperwork, at the counter
This is the one that changes the month-end conversation.
The counter hands over a ticket. The tech photographs it there and then, and it’s filed against the purchase order and the job — labeled with the PO number so nobody has to guess what they’re looking at.
- No more paper riding around in a truck for three weeks.
- Not texted to somebody’s personal phone, where it dies when they get a new one.
- Accounts payable can see what was actually bought when the supplier’s invoice turns up.
- The photo is filed beside everything else for that job, in one place, for good.
Four seconds at the counter.
Filed against the job and the PO.
Nothing walks off the job
Asking nicely doesn’t work. Asking at the right moment does.
When a tech goes to mark a job complete, ServiceProof checks whether they raised a purchase order on it that has no receipt photo and no parts against it yet. If so, it asks for the photo — right then, while the ticket is still in the truck.
- The ask happens at the one moment the tech can still do something about it.
- They can skip it — sometimes there genuinely is no paperwork.
- But skipping writes a note on the job saying so, naming the PO and the supply house. Nothing disappears quietly.
It’s a gate, not a wall. A tech is never stuck — and the office always knows which it was.
And the office side of it
The counter is where a PO starts. It is not where it ends. If you run the whole platform, the rest of the chain is here too — the order, what actually turned up, and where it is now.
What was ordered, from whom, for which job, and what has arrived.
Receive partially, and honestly
Three of five arriving is normal. Recording five because the paperwork said five is how stock stops matching reality, so receiving is line by line and a short delivery stays a short delivery until the rest shows up.
Suppliers, and the branch you actually use
A supplier can have several locations — the parts counter you pick up from and the depot that delivers are different addresses with different hours. Record the one the tech drives to, not the main office on the invoice.
One parts catalog
A part installed in March and a part ordered in June are the same thing, so they can be counted together. Each supplier’s own code for it lives alongside — they never agree with each other. And its chosen picture sits beside it in the order’s part picker. Pictures on every part →
A truck is a warehouse
So is a courier bag. They differ by flags — does it move, does it hold stock — not by kind, so one set of screens handles the shelf, the van and the bag, and moving stock to a van is an ordinary transfer.
Van stock that is actually right
The number nobody trusts in most companies, and the reason is almost always the same: installing a part does not take it off the van.
Here it does. A technician attaches the vehicle they took this morning, the visit records which one that was, and the part comes off that van. So “which van was this billed off?” has an answer a year later.
Nobody is permanently assigned a truck. If a van breaks down at ten in the morning they take another and keep working — the job ends one visit and opens the next, and the parts stay straight.
What is on each shelf and on each van, right now.
Purchasing finds out immediately
The moment a PO is raised, an email goes to your purchasing address.
- Your warehouse knows what was bought, for which job, from which supplier — the same day, not at month end.
- Stock that came in on a PO can be received against the right job.
- Somebody in the office can catch the mistake while it’s still cheap to catch.
And the job itself grows a purchase order panel: the numbers, the supply house, who raised it, the quantities and the total. An owner looking at a job can see what was spent on it without leaving the job.