So take this scenario : a customer phones you up and needs a Gas Safety Certificate inspection. They give you a postcode of BA1 5NE, in Bath. Your office is in Newcastle and you have no idea who your nearest certified contractor is. Your company has 15 full-time staff and you have over 15,000 contractors on record! Fortunately, all your contractors are stored nicely in your CRM, which is fully integrated with your Sales processing systems in Brightpearl.
You quickly put a quote together using pre-defined items and pricing, and with a couple of clicks you've identified that the job should be put out to Minerva Gas Ltd, based just 2.5 miles from your customer. You raise a work order, and within 2 minutes you've sent it to the contractor by email and SMS with the site address automatically filled out, and you've not had to re-type a single thing. As the job progresses you can manage updates, attach the report to the quote and then invoice the customer. All the accounting has just taken place behind the scenes for you. Now that's handy.
Step 1: Setup your contractors as suppliers
You'll need to add your contractors into Brightpearl, and ensure that they are all set to "supplier" (tick the supplier box in the full-screen contact edit, or use the "add supplier" link from within the CRM green-zone menu). You can also import loads of contractors at once from Excel, Outlook or many other systems. Make sure that they have valid postcodes if you want to use the distance lookup.
It's a good idea to categorise all your contractors and suppliers using Tags; set these up first before you add the contacts. Tags won't be used as part of the work order creation process, but they will help you keep on top of lots of data.
Learn more about creating & editing suppliers
Learn more about importing suppliers
Step 2: Setup your products
If you sell 3 main "jobs", then create these as products. It could be as simple as:
- Gas - Initial inspection, £50+VAT
- Gas - Installation on site, £100+VAT
- Gas - Report production and survey, £150+VAT
- Asbestos - Inspection, £150+VAT
- Asbestos - Report production and survey, £350+VAT
Now, we need to connect the suppliers to the items that they provide. Open each product, and in the Suppliers tab, select all the suppliers that provide that item or service. Select more than one supplier using Ctrl-click (or Cmd-click on a Mac). Don't forget to untick the "manage stock" for each product, since stock control won't factor for you.
Step 3: Create the work order
We're going to use "Purchase Orders" as work orders.
- Go to Sales > New Quote and create a quote for the customer. Make sure their site address is in the delivery address field.
- Click the drop-down arrow on the Save changes button and click Clone to PO.
- On the right hand side on the clone screen, you'll see that the delivery [site] postcode has been put into the search box. If you click "find nearest supplier", then the system will search for the closest supplier that provides the service on the quote.
- Click the selected supplier.
- Choose to update the sale status if you want, and make sure that the delivery address is set to Customer address.
- Click Clone now.
- A new Purchase Order will be created for the supplier (contractor), which you can email straight from the system using the email/print button. You may well want to create a new template that has more information on it, rather than use the standard Purchase Order template. Some of our users have 3 or 4 different "work order" templates for different services.
You might want to edit your Purchase Order statuses to be something like:
- Pending
- Sent to contractor
- Contractor confirmed
- Work in progress
- Work completed
- Invoice received
This will let you keep on track of which orders are in progress. You can even set "collection" and "delivery" dates, which you can use for anything that you want.
When the contractor comes back to you with the report (hopefully as a PDF or other electronic format!) you can attach it to the work order in Brightpearl, or attach it to the original quote, and then invoice the customer for work completed.
All managed nice and easily using a system that all your team can access online, is backed up every day and integrates seamlessly with your accounting and CRM.
