Supplying a building site: quotes and part-deliveries

A site buys in a shape no shop does: it asks for a quote, takes a first delivery, changes the quantity, takes two more, and settles at the end of the job. Each of those four steps breaks a system built for a counter sale, and the break is silent until the last one. Then somebody adds up what was ordered and what was delivered, and the total does not match.

What is a quote, if it is not a price list?

A price list is a rule that applies to whoever walks in. A quote is a promise addressed to one buyer, for a stated scope, with a date on which it stops being true — and that date is the whole document.

Materials move. Cement, steel and timber do not hold a price for a season, so a quote with no expiry is a standing offer to sell at last month's cost for as long as the customer keeps the paper. A validity date is what makes the number honest on the day it is signed.

The quote also needs a version rather than only a number. When the buyer raises the quantity, the second version replaces the first and the first stays visible, because the delivery that arrives on Thursday may have been ordered against it. A system that overwrites the quote destroys the record of what was agreed when the order was placed.

And the quote is not the price list. The list feeds it; once issued, the quote governs that buyer for its stated scope. When the two disagree in December, the question is which was in force when the order was accepted. Where the buyer's system has to read the order rather than a person, UBL 2.1 defines an order and an order response, each with identifiers of its own.

What does the second delivery do to the first?

Nothing to the first, and everything to the balance. The order keeps one line per item — ordered, delivered, remaining — and each delivery note points at that line, which is the identifier the buyer quotes back when a load is short. The third delivery closes an order for 100 bags that has already received 30 and 30, and the buyer can see 40 outstanding without asking anyone.

The common failure is treating every arrival as a new order. Do that and the statement shows three orders of 40 and a remaining balance that means nothing, while the invoice, arithmetically correct, is disputed line by line.

A part-delivery needs a state, not a document: a backorder on the line, with the quantity and a promised date. Without it the foreman counts 100 bags on paper, 60 on the ground, and reports your error to his director.

Who on a site may place an order?

The site, not the man, and inside the site three roles: whoever receives, whoever orders, whoever approves up to a ceiling.

A foreman is almost never the buyer. He receives, he signs, he calls when a pallet is short or a bag is torn, and if the system treats his signature as an order you will deliver twice and argue once. The buyer commits money and often sits in an office in another wilaya; the approver is the man with a written ceiling.

So the account belongs to the site: a named project with an address, a gate, a delivery window and a phone that answers at seven in the morning. People attach to it with a role, and the site record answers the driver's question at the barrier: who may refuse this load, who may accept it.

Why must the credit limit cover the company and not the man?

Because the same company runs four sites and pays for all four. A limit per person multiplies the exposure by the number of foremen; a limit per site lets one site exhaust the group's headroom.

The limit therefore sits on the paying entity, the exposure is summed across its sites, and each site shows how much of the shared limit it has used. That is the only arrangement in which "we are at the limit" tells a buyer which site to settle first.

What is the argument at the end actually about?

Almost never the price. It is the arithmetic of a delivered total that differs from the ordered total, and the differences have five causes worth separating: a short delivery nobody chased, a substitution accepted at the gate, a price change after the quote expired, wastage charged to the site, and a return that was collected but never recorded.

Reconcile on one sheet, per line: ordered, delivered, invoiced, paid, with a cause written beside every gap. A gap without a cause stays open and holds the statement. The statement is generated, dated, and built from the same lines the deliveries posted against, so any figure on it can be traced back to a quote version, a note, a signature.

Document	What it fixes	When it stops being true
Quote	price and scope for one buyer	at its validity date
Order	quantity, site, delivery address	when delivered in full
Delivery note	what actually arrived	the moment it is signed

In what order do you fix this?

1. Rebuild last month's largest site on one page: quote, orders, delivery notes, invoices and payments.
2. Give every quote a validity date, and a version that is never overwritten.
3. Make each delivery note point at an order line, and show the remainder on the site statement.
4. Register the site as the account, with the three roles named.
5. Move the credit limit onto the paying company, with the per-site split visible.
6. Reconcile ordered, delivered, invoiced and paid monthly, with a cause beside every difference.

Where this goes wrong

• "Same as last time" is the quote. No version, no date, and a price from March arriving in September with a delivery.
• Every delivery becomes an order. The balance means nothing, the statement is unreadable, and the buyer argues with an invoice that is correct.
• The credit limit is per person. Four sites, four limits, one exposure that nobody adds up until a cheque bounces.
• The statement is assembled by hand at month end from three sources, and becomes a fourth version of the truth.
• Substitutions are accepted at the gate and never priced. The delivered total is right, the invoice is wrong, and both sides can prove it.

What this does not cover

It says nothing about retention, guarantees, late-payment interest or who owns materials left on site; those are contractual questions with a lawyer in them. It does not cover the buying side, nor how a price list should be maintained. And it assumes somebody signs at the gate: where loads are dropped at a barrier with no signature, the whole chain rests on the driver's memory, and no report repairs that.

We build the site account — quote versions, order lines, delivery notes that point at them and a statement that reconciles — for suppliers whose customer is a gate, not a counter.