Know what was ordered, what showed up, and what you owe for it.

Pick the supplier from your supplier list, which you can import from a spreadsheet. Add the lines, each coded to a line of the job's budget. A purchase order is for goods. A work order is for a sub-trade's labour, which has nothing to deliver and is billed for work done.

Each order carries two taxes, GST or HST and PST, RST or QST, charged on the goods and not on freight. Send it by email: the supplier opens a link to view it and acknowledges it, with no account to make. An order placed by phone can be marked sent instead.

An order sent and not acknowledged after seven days is flagged, once. That is how a framing package fails to arrive: the office thinks it is ordered and the supplier never saw the email.

Field users can record what arrived from their phone, part deliveries included, with photos of the packing slip or the load. They see the quantities they need to check and none of the prices. A delivery recorded wrong is corrected or reversed, not deleted.

Amend an order when the supplier substitutes or the quantities change, and the totals are worked out again at the order's own tax rates before you save. Close an order short when the rest is never coming, so it stops counting as committed cost.

Record the supplier's bill with a scan or photo of it, against the order. Ridgepole checks the bill's total against what is left on the order. A small overrun clears: $5 or 2 percent of what is left on the order, whichever is greater. Past that, the bill is over-billed, and it cannot be approved without an explicit override and a written reason. Who overrode it, and why, is kept in the job's activity.

It also checks quantities against deliveries. A bill for forty sheets when thirty-two arrived is flagged. That one is a flag, not a block, because suppliers sometimes bill ahead of delivery and you decide. A bill that is wrong can be marked disputed.

Approving a bill posts each line to the budget line it is coded to, in one step, so the budget never has half a bill on it. A line with no budget line of its own lands on the job's Materials line. Owners, admins and project managers approve.

Pay the supplier the way you already do, then record it against the bill: cheque, e-Transfer, wire, card or cash. Owners and admins record payments. Bills coming due and past due are listed by age, and approvers are told when a bill comes due, once per due date, not every morning.

On Enterprise with QuickBooks Online connected, approved bills and the payments on them are entered in QuickBooks under the job, each line on the expense account for its budget category, with GST or HST on a code you claim back and PST or RST kept in the cost.