How to delegate and control purchasing tasks and checklists

Often it is necessary to perform some acquiring tasks for the company. These tasks can be delegated to a certain specialist - purchasing manager. For example in case when estimator or some technical specialist creates the list of required materials and goods (for example house building estimate) and sends it to purchase manager in order to find suppliers which offer best possible prices and make all required purchase procedures. This process can be described as follows:

• Purchase manager receives checklist of needed merchandise with estimated prices
• Purchase manager calls different suppliers (looks through price lists, visiting web-sites etc.) and finds out what they offer
• As soon as sufficient price is found purchase manager makes an order, if price differs from estimated the purchase manager should register actual price
• Then purchase manager reports about task performance
• The price difference should be calculated and summed up by all items of checklist to know if company exceeded the expenses limits or managed to economize.

VIP Task Manager is team task and time management groupware that owing to its flexibility can be used for sales/purchase planning and tracking. VIP Task Manager allows creating additional task attributes of various types and custom fields with formulas. It allows creating checklists of goods that should be purchased, assign these checklists to purchase manager and allows purchase manager to report the progress, add information and attach files if required.

In order to organize purchase workflow in VIP Task Manager you need to:

• start your task management application
• create task group "Purchasing checklist", assign task group to Purchase manager
• allow your purchase manager View and Edit tasks in this group
• create numeric task attributes "estimated price", "actual price"
• create calculated custom field "price difference" with formula that subtracts "actual price" form "estimated price"
• create additional purchasing task statuses for task group ("Ordered", "Delivered" etc.)
• open Task List mode, set filter to show "Purchasing checklist" group
• create tasks within the "Purchasing checklist" group so each task represents one item of checklist
• enter estimated prices in each task if required, check the estimated total amount
• monitor in real-time the state of purchasing checklists by checking out each item's status
• compare estimated prices vs. actual with a help of Bar or Column diagrams
• see the total amount of actual prices and price difference