Ramp or Procurify for a GC Running Several Active Jobs

Every material purchase, equipment rental and subcontractor draw on a commercial job needs to be tied to a specific cost code so a project manager can see real-time cost against budget while the job is still running, not after it closes. Payables days for construction firms run around 36 days on average¹, which gives a GC real room to manage cash across concurrent jobs, but only if the system tracking those payables actually knows which job each invoice belongs to.

Procurify's purchase-order model fits this directly: a requisition gets tied to a job and cost code before the material is ordered, which means the budget-to-actual comparison a PM needs is available the moment the PO is cut, not weeks later when the invoice finally arrives.

Not every purchase on a job site fits a formal requisition cycle. A superintendent who needs a part from the local supply house to keep a crew working doesn't have time to file a request and wait for approval, and a purchasing process that ignores that reality just pushes the spend onto a personal card that never gets coded to the job at all.

Ramp's card model handles that gap: a superintendent gets a card with a limit and a job code attached, so the same-day purchase still lands in the right place in the job cost report, without anyone having to wait on an approval that wouldn't have changed the decision anyway.

A commercial job typically holds back retainage, say 5 to 10 percent depending on the contract, released against milestones and tied to lien waivers from every subcontractor and material supplier on the job. That documentation trail is exactly what an owner or a bank auditing the job wants to see, and it's exactly what a purchase-order system with approvals built in produces automatically: who requested the material, who approved it, what job and cost code it hit, and what the resulting invoice matched against.

A card statement alone doesn't produce that trail. It shows what was spent, but not the approval chain or the cost-code tie-out an audit actually wants, and reconstructing that chain from memory during a draw dispute is a bad position to be in. The subcontractors on the other side of that retainage feel the same timing pressure, since their own suppliers expect payment regardless of when the GC releases a holdback, which is one more reason the paper trail needs to exist before the dispute, not after it.

Running several jobs at once means the firm's cash position is really the sum of several separate job cash positions, each moving on its own draw schedule and its own payables timeline. A GC that can't see, job by job, what's committed versus what's actually been paid is flying blind on cash even if the firm's overall bank balance looks fine this week.

This is the strongest argument for a requisition-based system over a card-only approach at this scale: it's not about controlling any individual purchase, it's about being able to answer, for any job, what's been committed against the budget right now, before the invoices land.

Most GCs at this scale land on a split rather than an either-or: formal purchase orders through something like Procurify for material orders and subcontractor commitments above a set dollar threshold, tied to job and cost code, and job-coded cards through something like Ramp for site-level purchases that need to happen today. The threshold matters more than the tool: set it too low, say $40, and every superintendent ends up filing paperwork for routine parts; set it too high and material commitments large enough to matter aren't getting captured until the invoice arrives.

Most firms find that number by watching a few months of card activity and asking, for each larger charge, whether a second set of eyes before the purchase would have changed anything. If the answer is usually no, the threshold is set about right.

Build the split with these rules:

• Tie every material purchase, equipment rental and subcontractor draw to a job cost code, so project managers see cost against budget while the job is running.
• Use formal purchase orders for material orders and subcontractor commitments above a set dollar threshold.
• Give superintendents job-coded cards with sensible limits for same-day site purchases.
• Keep the request, approval, job and cost code, and invoice match together as the documentation trail for retainage and lien waivers.
• Track committed versus paid amounts job by job to see the firm's true cash position.