Acquisition: buy the stuff right, from request to received
Buying materials and services is where small businesses quietly leak money — not to fraud, just to friction. The acquisition module is the purchasing desk: request, quote, compare, award, order, receive. Nothing glamorous, everything accounted for.
The core loop
You write a request — the items, quantities, units (lumber by the board foot, seats per month, whatever your trade measures in), a needed-by date. You send it to several vendors. Their quotes come back against the same request lines, and the module lines them up in a comparison matrix: cheapest columns first, best price per row highlighted, totals computed on honest math — recurring monthly costs normalized to first-year cost, tax applied where it actually applies, shipping and discounts in their proper places.
Then you award. The whole quote at once, or line by line — split awards across vendors are a first-class act, not a workaround, and the summary shows each vendor's share with their shipping, discount and tax handled by stated convention. Un-award the last line and the request steps back to sourcing on its own.
Vendors can quote themselves
Here's the part that saves actual hours. A request gets a private vendor link. Send it to the vendor — through the built-in RFQ email or your own phone — and they open a page that shows them the requested items and nothing else: no competitor pricing, ever. They fill in a real quote form, and it lands in your comparison matrix as a received quote. If they've never quoted you before, the vendor record creates itself from their name on the form.
And if a vendor's quote arrives as a wall of text in an email, paste it into the AI quote import — I read it, extract the lines, and match them against your request items for your review before anything saves. I parse; you decide.
Orders, approvals, receipts
An awarded quote becomes a purchase order with your own PO numbering, printable for sending, with a lifecycle and line-level receiving that clamps to what's actually outstanding. If your workspace sets an approval threshold, any request over it routes to an approvals inbox before awarding — with an audit trail of who decided what. And when the invoice arrives, the match is computed for you: what you ordered, what you received, what they billed, with the variances flagged.
If your stock manager is enabled, received POs post into inventory automatically at the PO's cost — purchasing and stock are one pipeline, not two systems to reconcile by hand.
Two more tools live in the drawer. Contract prices remember what you negotiated: when a vendor's quote drifts from the agreed rate, the comparison flags it, and when it matches, it says so. And an analytics page rolls up awarded spend, savings delivered against the priciest alternative, and price trends on the items you buy most — so the purchasing conversation happens once a quarter with numbers, not every week with hunches.
Related: received purchase orders post straight into stock at their cost, and capital purchases belong on the books in the asset manager.
How this compares
Procurement software tends to split by audience. Suites like Precoro or Procurify serve corporate purchasing departments; construction-flavored tools like Procore or Buildertrend bundle buying into a much bigger platform. They're serious products, and a large procurement team should look at them. What a small operator usually does instead is email five vendors, wait, and compare quotes in a spreadsheet — losing track of who quoted what, and on what terms.
This module digitizes exactly that loop without the enterprise scaffolding. Create a request with line items, send vendors a public quote link (the token is the credential — no vendor logins), and let them quote themselves. Then the compare matrix does the arithmetic honestly: first-year normalization of monthly and quarterly prices, tax and shipping applied by stated convention, best price per line highlighted. Award whole quotes or split them line by line, then generate purchase orders, receive against them, and enforce an approval threshold before anyone commits spend. Receiving feeds the stock ledger directly, so a purchase isn't the end of the paper trail — it's the start of inventory. Quotes in, POs out, one record throughout.
Try it
Acquisition lives under Acquisition in your sidebar. Create a request for something you genuinely need, send vendor links to two or three suppliers, and run one real comparison. The first time an award turns into a PO without a spreadsheet, you'll get it.
