Better buying for builders and construction firms

For many companies in the building and construction sectors, purchasing is a pain.

“We paid some sub-contractors twice for the same invoice. Our Director authorised payment of a paper invoice and the FD got an email chasing the same invoice. Now I’ve got to sort it out“. Accountant, Construction Business, Leeds

For most businesses in this sector, they are typically running multiple projects across multiple sites. This requires strict management of purchasing in order to protect profit margins and ensure on time delivery. The diverse nature of suppliers and sub-contractors and the wide range of highly specified materials and products mean that purchasing errors and discrepanies are commonplace, deliveries can be hard to track and reconcile against project costs and invoices. Back office accounts teams are often over-whelmed with paper invoices, chasing approvals and checking deliveries match invoices.

“As a result of our manual ordering and payment processes, we’ve had the wrong materials delivered to the wrong address and even paid some sub-contractors twice for the same invoice. Poor purchasing is costing us every day“. Financial Controller, family owned building firm.

There is a better way.

Zahara’s cloud based purchasing platform streamlines budgets, purchase requisitions, orders, approvals, goods receipts and invoices. Zahara allows you to set pricing from approved suppliers. For consutrcution companies running multiple projects at different sites, Zahara can give real time visibility and centralised control over every penny of the project’s cost.

• Process supplier invoices faster
• Speed up ordering of materials
• Control construction costs with budgets and job controls
• Manage subcontractor behaviour with T&C and PO’s
• Get better pricing by comparing with other Zahara users
• Allocate costs to Jobs correctly
• Get the guys on-site approving and receipting with just their phones

Once the project starts, the difference between profit and loss is managing costs. Controlling your costs with agreed pricing, supplier management and purchase controls can make the difference. Zahara allows you to ring-fence job costs, get supplier invoices approved and matched faster, making it easier to raise and send purchase orders. Whether you have central buying or need site-based staff to raise orders, Zahara gives your back-office team the immediate visual on all spend.

“I often don’t get told when a site manager changes the order or rejects the delivery. Sometimes it takes months to sort out and get the supplier paid because we don’t have any controls in place“. FD, regional building business, SE London.

The finance team can easily and quickly reference orders when matching invoices and also use our suite of OCR tools to get supplier invoices scanned and recorded and into the accounts system, like Sage 50, faster.

Efficiency Yes, But Cost Savings As Well

First and foremost, Zahara is a tool to make things more efficient. It’s a tool to facilitate better buying. The by-product of this is better costs control, better supplier management and reducing unnecessary or wasteful spend.

Take a look at Zahara.