Every job needs material before it can start, and the expensive way to find that out is on the morning the crew shows up. The Material Timeline turns each job’s material list into dated deadlines: when each item has to be ordered, when it has to be on site, and who it comes from. This guide follows one job, Sullivan Electric’s panel upgrade at the Harper residence, from the accepted bid to the delivery landing the day before the crew arrives. Every widget below is the real Conduit screen, driven by simulated data, so every control works.
Purchase Orders & Vendors
Material Timeline and Procurement Scheduling
Follow one material from an accepted bid to the job site. Auto-seeded requirements, order-by and needed-by dates, the office order board, one-click draft POs, the PO loop that moves requirements to Ordered and Delivered, and the calendar view of every deadline.
Lessons in this guide
StartDaily alerts
Every morning at 8:05 Conduit emails the purchasers (owners, admins and managers) a digest of orders due today and overdue, and each project manager a digest of their at-risk jobs. One email per company per kind per day, and only for active jobs, so a completed job with leftover rows never alerts.
Coming next
The pieces below are built on the server and exposed through the API, but do not have a screen yet. Each will get a lesson here when its screen ships.
- Schedule-risk verdict. The critical-path engine already computes each job’s earliest feasible start from its blocking materials and predecessor jobs, names the driver, and reports the day gap against the scheduled start. The Job detail strip that shows “arriving this week” and “late” at a glance is next.
- Job dependencies. “This job cannot start until that one is done” can be recorded through the API, with cycles rejected, and the engine already reads it. The editor on Job detail is next.
- Fallback options. When a delivery slips, ranked options with a cost and timeline delta: expedite, alternate vendor, substitute item, or proceed without it. Conduit reports that a job has to move; the contractor moves it on the calendar.
- Calendar critical path. Connecting a job’s orders, deliveries and predecessors on the calendar, with at-risk items in the warning color.
- Mobile. The same timeline, status changes and fallbacks in the Conduit mobile app for the crew.
Continue to Purchase Orders and Vendors for approvals, partial receipts, bills and the vendor portal, or back to Job Costs and Materials for materials actually used on a job.
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