Simplify your building materials operations with ease

A cement or steel quote often stays open for weeks. In that time the replacement cost of what you quoted can move, and the person who wrote the quote is rarely the person who notices. Most yards find out at invoicing. Some find out at the end of the quarter, when the gross margin came in three points under budget and nobody can say which jobs did it.

A quotation in Wizard carries the cost it was based on. Converting it into a sales order keeps that trail, so the gap between quoted margin and realised margin becomes a number you can pull up per customer, per material or per salesperson.

Volume pricing works off the same records. A contractor lifting forty tonnes and a walk-in buying two bags sit on different price lists, and neither is being priced from memory at the counter.

This is where generic inventory software usually breaks for a building materials supplier. Tiles are bought by the container, stocked by the box and sold by the square metre. Rebar comes in by the tonne and leaves as bars of a given length. If the system only understands one unit, somebody is converting by hand every day, and the errors land in stock valuation.

Once the conversions are held against the item, the counter can quote in whatever unit the customer thinks in while the warehouse still picks in the unit it stores.

Building materials are heavy and low in value per kilo, which makes this worse than it is in most trades. On a mixed container, allocating landed cost by invoice value quietly loads the expensive items and lets the heavy ones look more profitable than they are. Allocating by weight or volume gives a different answer, and for a supplier moving steel, cement and sanitary ware in the same shipment the difference is the whole margin.

Wizard lets you choose the basis. The point is less which method you pick and more that the cost sitting behind every sale is the same number your accounts recognise.

The usual failure is not theft or bad counting. It is two salespeople looking at the same 300 bags and both saying yes on a Tuesday afternoon. One of them finds out on the loading bay.

Multi-yard stock has the same problem in a wider form. A customer asks whether you have something, and the answer depends on whoever picks up the phone at the other branch. When every location posts into one database, that call stops being part of the sales process.

This trade runs on account. Contractors get paid late by their own clients and pass the delay down, so a supplier can be profitable on paper and short of cash at the same time. The number that matters is not total receivables, it is how much of it is over ninety days and which customers keep appearing in that column.

Because sales, deliveries and the ledger share one database, the balance shown at the counter is the real one. Nobody is releasing material against a figure that was accurate last Thursday.

For most suppliers the limit on daily revenue is not stock and not demand. It is how many runs the fleet can make, and how much of each run is wasted on two deliveries in opposite directions.

Here is the honest caveat. Wizard schedules and records deliveries. It does not plan routes for you or track a truck on a map. If you need live vehicle tracking, that stays a separate tool. What you get instead is the link between the order, the load and the invoice, so a delivery that went out short is visible in the same system that bills for it.