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ProcurementCost control

Why construction sites lose money on material purchases

Lost indents, WhatsApp approvals and missing delivery checks quietly eat into project margins. Here is where the leaks are and how to close them.

· 5 min read

Materials usually make up the largest share of a building project's cost. Even so, on most sites the buying process runs on paper indents, phone calls and WhatsApp messages. Every hand-off in that chain is a place where money can quietly leak away.

1. Indents that go missing

An engineer writes an indent, photographs it and forwards it to the purchase team. A week later nobody can find it, and the material is ordered in a hurry at whatever price the nearest vendor asks. Urgent buying is almost always expensive buying.

2. Too few quotations

When comparing vendors means scrolling through chats, teams tend to settle for one or two quotes. Collecting three quotations for every requisition, and showing them side by side, typically saves a few percent on each order. Across a whole project, that adds up to lakhs.

3. Deliveries nobody checks

Short supply and damaged goods are often discovered weeks later, long after the vendor has been paid. A simple receipt step, in which the engineer confirms what actually arrived and flags any problems, closes this gap.

Closing the leaks

The fix isn't more paperwork. It is one shared record per requisition, with a clear owner at each stage and a timestamp on every hand-off. That's the workflow DravyaX is built around.