Purchase orders
Purchase orders that commit money to a job the day you place them.
A purchase order is the only document in your office that is a real financial event and no transaction at all. You order $140,000 of gear in March, the bill arrives in June, and for three months the job-cost report tells your PM he has money he already spent. SubMark writes the order against the job, sends it to the supplier as a PDF, and shows the committed figure beside the invoiced one so nobody has to remember the difference.
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- Five statuses and no guessing: Draft, Sent, Invoiced, Paid, Cancelled.
- Committed cost shows as its own bar beside invoiced material cost on the job.
- Email the order to the supplier with the PDF attached. Replies come back to you.
How material buying goes wrong on a spreadsheet.
The order exists only in a sent email
The PM emails the supplier a quantity and a price. There is no record anybody else can read, so when he is on vacation and the truck shows up short, the office is reconstructing a purchase from a thread.
Committed money is invisible until the bill arrives
Your job-cost report is honest about what has been invoiced and silent about what has been ordered. On a trade with a 40% material line that is not a rounding difference — it is the whole question of whether the job is in trouble.
The invoice does not match the order, and nobody notices
The price is not the one on the quote, or the quantity is not the one you asked for. The only person on earth who would catch it is the one who placed the order nine weeks ago, and he is not the one coding the bill.
Two people order the same material
A PM orders the frames, the superintendent calls the supply house about the same frames, and you find out when two confirmations land. Without one numbered list per job, duplicate buying is a matter of luck.
The price list is in somebody’s head
You negotiated the sheet price in January. The order placed in August uses whatever the counter quoted that morning, because the agreed number was never written anywhere an order gets built from.
How an order runs.
One numbered order per purchase, against a job and a supplier you already have in the system. The parts that cost money are deliberately a click, not a schedule.
- 01 Write the order against the job
A PO number, the project, the supplier, the date and an Expected Delivery date. The PO number is unique within your company, so two people cannot issue the same one by accident.
- 02 Build the lines
Each line takes a material type from your own list, a description, a quantity, a unit and a unit price. Set a tax rate once on the order and the total carries it. Each material type carries the unit it is normally counted in — sheets, feet, each — and the line’s unit box suggests it, so the quantity means the same thing to you and the supplier.
- 03 Decide whether this one carries prices
Pricing is a switch per order. Turn it off and the order is quantities only — the list reads "Qty only" instead of a dollar figure. That is the order you hand a foreman to pick up, without putting your material margin in front of the gate guard.
- 04 Get it approved, if your office works that way
Approval is off until you switch it on, because most offices do not want a second step on a $900 order. Switched on, a draft is submitted for approval, and an approver with the permission approves it or rejects it with a reason. A rejected order can be fixed and resubmitted, and the rejection reason clears when it is — so the one on screen is always about the current version.
- 05 Send it to the supplier
Build the PDF with your logo on it, or email the order straight from SubMark to an address and a CC, with an optional note. The PDF attaches itself. Replies go to your own email address, not to a no-reply, and the order records when it was sent and to whom.
- 06 Move it as the bill comes in
Move the order to Invoiced when the supplier’s bill arrives, then to Paid, so the list shows which orders are still waiting on a bill. If you run the optional invoices inbox, a supplier invoice matched to the order fills in its Billed figure.
- 07 Push it to QuickBooks, one at a time
A finished order goes across to QuickBooks Online as a purchase order with a click, and comes back marked as being in QuickBooks. Nothing is pushed on a schedule, because a purchase order you did not mean to create is expensive to unwind.
Everything above ships today and none of it is a tier you upgrade into. The core modules are on in every trade pack from setup; a few extras, like the invoices inbox, are a switch in Settings. The full list is on the product page.
In the app
The order, and the money row above the list.
The purchase orders page opens on a metric row — five cards, or six once approvals are switched on — because the question is almost never about one order:
- Open POs
- Every order sitting at Draft or Sent, across every job. The count that tells you whether buyout is ahead of the field or behind it.
- Committed
- The money on every order that has not been cancelled — drafts counted, because an order somebody has written is one they mean to place. Spent, in every sense except the one your ledger recognizes.
- Billed
- How much of that committed money has come back as a supplier invoice matched to the order. Matching happens in the optional invoices inbox, so with that module off this card stays at zero.
- Remaining
- Committed less billed: the invoices still coming for material already ordered. Without the invoices inbox it reads as the whole committed figure, because nothing has been matched against it.
- Total Paid
- What has actually gone out the door to suppliers.
- Awaiting Approval
- Only appears when you have turned approvals on. Orders sitting on somebody’s desk, as a number instead of a hunch.
- Five statuses
- Draft, Sent, Invoiced, Paid, Cancelled. That is the whole list, and each one is a colored chip with the word next to it.
- Committed on the job
- Job costing shows "Materials (committed POs)" as its own dashed bar beside "Materials (invoiced)", so a PM can see which part of the material cost is paperwork and which part is a promise.
Who can do what is a permission, not a convention: writing orders, seeing the money on them, approving them and sending one to QuickBooks are four separate rights, and which roles hold each one is yours to set.
Straight answer
What it does not do.
A product page that only lists wins is a product page you stop trusting in week two. These are the gaps, in our own words, before you find them yourself.
- There is no Received status. Five statuses, none of them receipt — so "arrived Tuesday, short two frames" is a daily-log entry and a photo, never a state on the order. We would rather say that than imply a receiving workflow we do not have.
- There are no cost codes. A line carries a material type and the order belongs to the job. Nothing maps it to a code library, because SubMark does not have one.
- The job’s cost total and its budget alerts use invoiced cost, not committed. Committed shows beside it as its own bar. That is deliberate — an alert that fires on money not yet billed cries wolf every buyout — but it means you read two figures, not one.
- A counter purchase has no order. A foreman’s will-call ticket at the supply house is a real cost with no PO behind it, and SubMark has no mobile capture for the ticket. It reaches the job only if the charge is coded to the job in QuickBooks and comes back with the cost pull.
- A quote on a bid does not become a purchase order. Supplier quotes live with the bid; the order is written fresh. Nothing carries a number across for you, so the agreed price is retyped once, on purpose, by somebody looking at it.
- Approval is one step, not a chain. An order is approved or rejected by somebody with the right; there is no two-signature ladder by dollar value.
- A quantities-only order does not go to QuickBooks. The push needs prices on the order, which is consistent enough — a purchase order carrying no dollar figure is not something an accounting system can book — but it means the version you hand a foreman is not a version your bookkeeper ever sees.
Which trades feel this most.
Same problem, different shape. Each trade page leads with that trade's own phases, schedule of values and wording.
Electrical
Gear, wire and devices are bought all year on long lead times, so committed cost is the only honest read on a job for months at a stretch.
Doors, Frames & Hardware
Half the contract value is material bought on one order, and the hardware schedule changes after it is placed.
HVAC / Mechanical
Equipment is ordered early and big. One $200,000 order moves the job’s whole material position the day it is placed.
Questions
Purchase orders: what a sub’s office actually asks.
Can I send a purchase order to a supplier without showing prices?
Yes. Pricing is a switch on each order. Turn it off and the order is quantities only — the list shows "Qty only" where the total would be — which is the version you hand a foreman to pick up material with.
Does a purchase order show on the job cost report before the bill arrives?
Yes, as its own figure. Job costing shows "Materials (committed POs)" as a separate dashed bar beside "Materials (invoiced)". The job’s cost total and its budget alerts use invoiced cost, so committed money is visible without triggering an alert on every buyout.
Do we have to approve purchase orders?
Only if you want to. Approval is off until a company switches it on, and most small offices leave it off. Switched on, a draft is submitted for approval and an approver either approves it or rejects it with a reason; fixing and resubmitting clears the old reason.
What happens when the material arrives short?
You record it — in the daily log, with a photo, and as a note on the order. There is no Received status on a purchase order in SubMark, so receipt is documented rather than tracked as a state. We would rather tell you that than let you find it in week two.
Does it connect to QuickBooks?
Yes. A finished order pushes across to QuickBooks Online as a purchase order with a click, one at a time, and the order records that it is in QuickBooks. Supplier bills coded to the job pull back the other way as job cost.
Can I call them something other than purchase orders?
Yes. The label is yours — plenty of offices call them material orders — and the page heading and the nav item follow whatever you set.
Read next
The purchase order process for subcontractors
The discipline itself — who may order, what a line has to say, and how committed cost stops surprising you.
Long-lead material tracking
Why the order date is set by the submittal approval and not by the install date, and the five dates you work backwards from.
Collecting supplier quotes for a bid
Where the price on the order comes from, and how to get three comparable numbers instead of three different scopes.
Put last month’s material orders in it.
Start the trial, enter the orders you placed last month against the jobs they belong to, then open job costing. The gap between committed and invoiced is usually bigger than the office expects.
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The rest of the job
Change orders
From the day the field finds the change to the day it is in the schedule of values, with an audit trail at every step.
T&M tickets
Priced in the office off your own rate lists, signed on site, and several tickets roll into one change order.
Schedule of values
One SOV per job, built from your trade’s own breakdown, locked when the first draw goes out, and approved change orders added to it automatically.
Draw tracking
Fifteen jobs, nine GCs, nine cutoff dates and nine submission methods — in one calendar and one log, with drawn, certified and received as three different numbers.
Retainage tracking
Five or ten percent of everything you have ever billed, sitting somewhere, on jobs some of which finished last year.
Daily logs
The record that wins an argument nine months later, written in two minutes by a foreman who wants to go home.
Lien waiver tracking
Which waivers went up the chain, which the GC has received, and which draw is sitting still because one of them has not.
Job costing
The overrun you can still do something about, instead of the one you find in the end-of-job autopsy.
Crew scheduling
Who is on which job on Monday, across every job — and a flag the moment the same crew is promised to two of them.
QuickBooks
Bills and card purchases pull back as job costs. Draws and POs push across with a click. Your books stay your books.
Time tracking
Hours per worker, per job, per day — signed by the worker who worked them, approved by the office, and read straight into job costing.
Safety records
Toolbox talks signed off per person, scored site inspections, and certification and COI expiries you see 30 days out instead of on the day.
Submittals
A material library you build once, packages assembled from it per job, and a cover sheet with every product data sheet merged behind it.