Joe works in the housing development industry in New Jersey and was wondering if he can use SpendMap to buy electrical services.

Sure thing Joe.  SpendMap can be used to manage Purchase Orders for all kinds of services, just as easily as physical products.  And there’s actually not much difference in the process.

So using your example of buying “one hour of installing electrical outlets”, you might want to set up a unit of measure as “HOUR” in the Units of Measure Master File, and then you can use that UoM on the PO. So just like you would buy 1 EACH of a physical product, you would buy 1 HOUR of the service.

Another Unit of Measure that I see people use commonly for services is “LOT”. That is, rather than specifying the number of hours as the quantity for the order, they would buy “1 LOT” of services (e.g. Quantity: 1, Unit: LOT, DESCRIPTION: Complete installation and configuration of PC). This obviously makes sense when the number of hours is unknown and/or if there is a fixed price for the complete service. You can actually see a sample of this in the Evaluation Copy of SpendMap…just log in as the user “FULL”, and check out PO #10026 in that user’s PO Work Area.

With respect to the Item Master File, you may or may not decide to use that for services like this. For example, if you want to keep track of the history of all the times you bought that “electrical service”, by all means add an item to the Item Master as “Misc. Electrical Services” or something like that, and then pick that item each time you order those services, after which you can see the history of that service using this…
– PURCHASING > Status & Inquiries > Item History

That said, it’s also quite common to not use the Item Master for services, and just do a “one-off” instead. You can learn about that in the subsection “Using One-Offs”, in this section of the Online Help…
– System-Wide Features and Information > Master Files > About Master Files

Finally, you may want to consider the receiving process when buying services.  Many SpendMap customers do use the Receiving Module to indicate that the services that they purchased were “delivered” (i.e. completed).  While there’s no physical product to receive, you are nevertheless receiving the service, so you might want the status of the Purchase Order to reflect that, and of course if you’re using the optional Invoice Approval Module, you’ll want to know that the service was in fact delivered before paying the invoice, just like a physical product.

That said, it not uncommon to skip the receiving process for services.  If that’s your preference, you can just wait for the invoice to show up and you can do a two-way match (PO > Invoice) instead of a three-way match (PO > Receipt > Invoice), or you might want to check out the Auto-Receiving feature in SpendMap, which can automatically receive Purchase Orders for services on their delivery dates, without having to enter receipt transactions manually.  You can learn more in this section of the Online Help…
– RECEIVING > Utility > Auto-receive POs