Some of your largest PVF accounts are also the most complicated. A mechanical contractor with fifteen service trucks and four project foremen. A property management company with plumbing staff in forty buildings. A manufacturer with three plants that want one price file but separate ship-tos and billing. They all ask the same question: who is ordering, and how do we keep it under control?
The distributor who answers that question gets more of their business.
Managers approve, buyers order
Every person who orders can have their own login. For each one, the account can choose whether they can place orders, request quotes only, or both. That handles a common situation: a service tech who should be able to ask the price of a water heater but shouldn't buy three of them on the company account.
Orders that need a second look go to the person who manages the account. The manager gets it by email and text with an approve or decline button, so they can approve from a job site without logging in to anything.
Monthly budgets
Each buyer can have a monthly budget, set up in one of these ways:
- Approve every order: every order from that buyer goes to the manager first.
- Approve over budget only: orders go through, and only one that pushes the month past the budget is held for approval.
- No limit: leave the budget blank for buyers who should order freely.
For a plumbing service company, each truck might have a monthly budget for parts, with anything over going to the service manager. For a property manager, each building's maintenance person might have a budget, with the regional manager approving the rest. The customer gets control, and you keep the order instead of losing it to a purchasing freeze.
Master accounts for multi-site customers
A master account holds the price file, the customer's part numbers and the terms for all its locations. No orders are placed on the master itself. Each location points to it and inherits the pricing, discount and part-number cross-references, and anything set on a location overrides the master.
You can also block an item on the master and name what buyers should order instead. If a hospital system has standardized on one brand of flush valve or one lead-free mixing valve, you can block the others and point buyers to the approved item. The buyer is told at checkout, and it covers every location.
For on-site programs, load every bin on the master and assign each to a location, so each plant or building sees only its own bins.
Why control wins business
Large PVF buyers often cut suppliers when they lose control of spend. Budgets, approvals and master accounts let them put more people on your app because they can see and limit what those people buy. That turns a single-buyer account into dozens of buyers, all ordering from you.
It makes your rep's life easier, too. The rep is no longer stuck between a foreman who needs fittings today and an owner who wants to see every order. The rules are in the app, and everyone can see them. And when the owner wants to know why the month's PVF spend jumped, every order, approval and buyer is right there, so the answer takes a minute instead of a week of digging through tickets.
Book a demo and see it with your branch counter and inside sales team.