Our company’s Installation Service names are fairly “general” as we provide a wide scope of services. If we had a specific service made for every service we provide, we would have an overwhelming amount of services in our catalog and would have to be making new ones all the time for niche services. This means that our Services named things like “Plant Installation”, “Hardscape Installation”, etc get used for many purposes, and we typically will change the Display Name and Service Abbreviation within Estimates to make it clearer what the Service is actually for. It also means that often Services like “Hardscape Installation” appear several times on the same estimate under different groups. This works fine for scheduling and proposing Opportunities to customers (because they use the Display and Abbreviation names), but when we get to Purchasing, the only option to add to any lists to denote what Service the items for purchase are associated with, is the Service Name (which like I said, are usually pretty vague) or the Work Ticket number (which also doesn’t really give context to what that Work Ticket is regarding). This makes it difficult when our Operations Team does purchasing, because they don’t know what item goes with which ticket on proposals that have several tickets with the same Service name from Purchasing Assistant. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this clearer on the purchasing side, especially when one Opportunity has several of the same Service on it?
Using Services display names in Purchasing Assistant
+12Its’ been awhile so maybe you’ve solved this already.
I faced this problem early on. We solved it by reducing our construction “services” down to about 4 total and then rename the display. Each unique service creates a unique ticket. Therefore we will reuse out “general construction service” multiple times on a single estimate - renaming it each time. This is fine as long as the same team is doing the work. We do seperate work tickets when a different team is doing the work.
In purchasing assistant I group by item category, then by property name. I have seperate lists for categories. I create 1 purchase receipt per property for each item category, and send it to my vendors all at the same time. This results in basically 20 pruchase receipts going to the same vendor, but each receipt is seperated by job and has the work ticket/ job name on the receipt.
You can have the work ticket listed on the purchase receipt layouts too which help when sending them over to vendors and checking in the system to match up invoices.
+14One work around I can think of is to add an estimating note to at least one item in each service that you can you use to appear on the purchasing assistant list. Then you can group by work ticket and know what it’s for. We don’t have this issue for some reason… but maybe this could work. Estimating notes have to be added before the Opp is won though.
+14Oh - and you may know this already but the estimating notes only appear after midnight… and i’ve noticed they may be spotty on changed contract opportunities (but might be ok on work order change orders).
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