MainBoss as a Purchase Request System

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Many organizations already have purchasing systems, often built into a general accounting system. For this reason, organizations may think that MainBoss's purchasing capabilities won't be useful.

However, the purchasing facilities in MainBoss can still be helpful when viewed as a purchase request system. You can use MainBoss to determine information such as:

• The items you should restock
• The best vendor for a particular item
• Expected receipt dates
• Actual receipt dates
• Where received items should be sent and stored
• Connections between purchase orders and work orders: this tells you when an item was ordered for a specific job, rather than just for general inventory

Using this information, you might use MainBoss as follows:

1. Use Items | Item Restocking to determine what inventory items you need to buy.
2. Use MainBoss item pricing records to determine the best vendors to buy from.
3. Draw up draft purchase orders for each vendor. Essentially, you're using MainBoss as a "scratchpad" where you can work out what to order from whom.
4. Once you've used MainBoss to clarify what you want to buy, you can use information from MainBoss's purchase orders to create purchase orders using your actual purchasing system.
5. When you submit a purchase order to your actual purchasing system, Issue the corresponding MainBoss purchase order (including any useful information from your purchasing system, e.g. ID numbers).
6. When items are received, you can use MainBoss receiving facilities to indicate where the items should be stored. MainBoss can also tell you if a received item is allocated to a specific job, or just to general inventory.
7. When all the items on a MainBoss purchase order have been received, you can Close the purchase order to indicate it's finished.

If you use MainBoss to record in this way, maintenance workers will have convenient access to relevant information (if they have the appropriate security roles). In addition, you can use MainBoss to analyze purchasing information and to include that information in other reports. You can obtain a more complete picture of all your maintenance operations by including the information from Purchasing as well as other MainBoss modules.

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