Buying materials: requisition to purchase order
How a contractor can approve material purchases before anything is ordered: requisitions, supplier quotations, orders and who signs off each step.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Construction businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
On many building sites, buying is a phone call. The foreman runs short of cement or shuttering ply, rings the merchant the firm has always used, and collects on account. The office finds out when the supplier's statement arrives at month end, when the money is already spent and nobody can say whether the price was fair or the purchase was needed at all.
That habit costs contractors quietly. Two sites order the same material. A merchant who happens to be a friend of the buyer gets every order. A job priced on a thin margin loses it one small purchase at a time, and the loss only shows at the final account.
A short approval trail fixes most of this without slowing the site down: someone asks, someone else agrees, suppliers quote, and an order is raised that a second person approves. Here is how that trail works and what Achekam records at each step today.
Step one: a requisition that says what, why and roughly how much
A requisition is a written request to buy. In Achekam any staff member can raise one, and it holds three things: what is needed, why it is needed, and the estimated cost. On a job it might read: reinforcing steel for the ground-floor slab at the clinic project, needed before the pour, estimated from the bill of quantities.
The reason matters as much as the item. "Needed for the slab pour" tells the approver this is planned work. "Ran out" invites a fair question about why the first order was short.
The estimate does not have to be exact. Its job is to let the approver judge whether the request is in proportion to the job, and to warn the office that money is about to be committed.
Step two: approval by someone who did not ask
Achekam does not let the person who raised a requisition approve it. Someone else approves or declines. On a small firm that is usually the contracts manager or the owner; on a larger one, a quantity surveyor may approve site requests against the job's budget. ACCA's overview of internal controls covers the control environment, the types of control and the segregation of duties behind this rule.
Before saying yes, the approver should be able to answer three questions:
- Is this material in the contract scope, or is it a variation the client should pay for?
- Has it already been ordered for this site, or delivered to another one?
- Is the estimate in line with what the job was priced at?
If any answer is unclear, declining with a note is cheaper than arranging a return later.
Step three: quotations from one supplier list
Once a requisition is approved, the buyer captures supplier quotations against it and selects one. Suppliers come from a single supplier list that checks for duplicates by name or VAT number, which makes it harder for the same merchant to end up on the list twice.
Choosing the cheapest quotation needs no explanation. Choosing any other needs a written reason, and Achekam keeps it. Good reasons on site are concrete: the cheaper merchant cannot deliver before the pour, the lower price leaves out transport to site, or the cheaper product does not meet the specification. A quotation can also be disqualified with a reason, for example when it quotes a different grade of steel from the one specified.
Those reasons protect the buyer later. When a partner, the client's quantity surveyor or an auditor asks why the firm paid more, the answer is on the record rather than in someone's memory.
Step four: the purchase order and who may not approve it
A purchase order is raised from the selected quotation of an approved requisition, so an order cannot appear from nowhere. The person who raised the order cannot approve it. Once approved, an order can still be cancelled, but only with a reason.
Approved orders also count as committed spend against the budget for their expense account and period. The budget screen shows what was budgeted, what has been spent, what is committed and what is left, and it flags lines that are over-committed. It does not block the purchase, so the flag is a prompt for a conversation with the site, not a lock.
Getting the order to the supplier today
Achekam cannot yet send a purchase order to the supplier from any screen. The server can make the order's PDF, but there are no download or e-mail buttons on the purchase orders tab yet. Until there are, the buyer tells the supplier about the approved order from the firm's own e-mail address, quoting the items, quantities, agreed price and delivery address exactly as approved. Keep that e-mail with the job's records so the delivery and the supplier's invoice can be checked against it.
When material arrives, record it against the order line by line, as described in recording part deliveries to site.
For contractors in Nigeria and Kenya
Three limits apply to Nigerian and Kenyan workspaces at the time of writing. Purchase orders are recorded in rand, because the order form sends no currency. Purchase orders and supplier bills offer VAT at 15% or 0% and default to 15%, instead of your own country's rate. And a supplier's VAT number must be in the South African format, so Nigerian and Kenyan VAT numbers are refused. Check the currency and VAT on every order before approving it, and agree with your accountant how these orders should be treated in your books until the forms follow your country.
A one-page buying rule for site teams
Pin something like this up in the site office:
- No material is ordered without an approved requisition. A genuine emergency is recorded the same day.
- The approver is never the person who asked.
- Quotations are captured before the order, and choosing one that is not the cheapest carries a written reason.
- The order is approved by someone other than the person who raised it.
- The supplier receives exactly what was approved, in writing.
Firms that want a minimum number of quotations above a certain amount should read requiring several quotes on big purchases, because that rule cannot be switched on in the app yet. And because the same separation of duties protects wages as well as materials, stopping ghost workers and bank detail fraud is worth reading alongside this one.
Start with the next site request: name who approves at each step, write the rule on one page, and put that request through the requisition screen instead of the phone.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
