Field purchases
Open Purchasing → Field Purchases in Thermal →
What it's for
Field purchases is what technicians bought at the counter — the parts run that did not go through a purchase order. This screen is where those purchases get approved and allocated to the jobs they were for, so the cost lands where it belongs instead of floating.
Reach it from Materials & Purchasing → Purchasing → Field purchases, at
/purchasing/field-purchases.
Tabs
The screen has no tabs of its own — it is one of the Purchasing views.
Panels and controls
- Columns: Vendor, Technician, Date, Status, Total, and Unallocated. Unallocated is the working column: a purchase with money left unallocated is cost that has not reached a job yet.
- Approve accepts a purchase; Reject turns it down.
- Allocations split a purchase across the jobs it covered — one counter run often serves two jobs, and this is where that gets recorded honestly.
- An allocation already made can be corrected, so a mistake is a fix rather than a write-off.
- No field purchases is the empty state.
Field purchase cost appears on the job costing panel of the work orders it is allocated to, and in the materials reconciliation view. Leaving purchases unallocated does not make them disappear — it makes job margins look better than they are.
What it accepts
| Field | Format | Required | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Allocation | A job and an amount | Yes, to allocate | The remainder shows as Unallocated until it is all assigned |
| Approval | Approve or reject | Yes | An unapproved purchase does not reach job cost |
The purchase itself — vendor, date, total, receipt photo — is captured by the technician in the field app, not entered here.
How to configure it
- Purchasing settings decide whether field purchases need approval and above what amount.
- Job costing settings decide how allocated field-purchase cost lands on a job's margin.
- Bill matching settings decide how these purchases are reconciled against vendor statements.
Who can see it
This screen sits behind the Purchasing area.
Owners and office managers can open it. Dispatchers and technicians cannot — a technician records the purchase in the field app and sees their own, not the shop's queue. The gate is checked on the server, not just hidden in the sidebar, so a direct link does not get around it.
The full role matrix is on Roles & permissions.