MAV Flooring handled material tracking for its jobs the way a lot of contractors historically have: on paper, in Excel, and in people’s heads. An estimate for material would be created for a job, a purchase order built in Excel would go out to the vendor, and when the vendor’s invoice came back, someone would manually route it to the accounting team to apply to the right job’s cost. Once material physically arrived, it got assigned to a lettered storage bin, and from there, as material was used and shipped out to the job site over the course of the project, staff had to manually track what had been used and what was still on hand.
Quick answer: MAV Flooring tracked job material manually across paper, Excel, and verbal handoffs to accounting - a process where usage wasn’t always communicated, quietly skewing job-profitability numbers. Merit IT built a custom inventory application for receiving, bin assignment, job association, and movement tracking. It’s live today, and by making the process digital and visual instead of paper-based, it’s saved significant time and let multiple people work the process at once instead of waiting on each other.
Why manual material tracking becomes a financial accuracy problem, not just a speed problem
MAV also buys certain commonly-used items - glue and tack, for example - in bulk, to avoid constant small purchase orders. Those items get booked as a general accounting asset when purchased, and the cost is only supposed to move over to a specific job’s cost once it’s actually used there. In practice, warehouse staff would take what a job needed without always telling the accounting team. The cost had already been built into the job’s original estimate, so nothing was financially lost - but the accounting entry reallocating that cost from the general account to the specific job never happened, which meant job-profitability reports were quietly drifting away from reality, without anyone being able to easily tell how far off, or on which jobs.
What Merit IT built
Rather than trying to rebuild the entire estimate-to-accounting pipeline at once, Merit IT scoped the project in phases, focusing first on the piece with the most immediate operational impact: a purpose-built inventory application covering the receiving-through-shipping portion of the workflow - estimate, to cost sheet, to purchase order, to inventory app, with the app being the piece Merit IT built.
The application lets warehouse staff enter each item as it’s received - manufacturer, style, color, size, and quantity - assign it to a lettered bin, and associate it with the job it’s for. As material ships out to a job over the course of the project, staff log the quantity, date, and job, which deducts automatically from what’s on hand; MAV didn’t need a full history of bin-to-bin movement, only accurate current inventory and a record of what went out, to which job, and when. The application supports filtering and reporting by job, bin, or manufacturer, role-based access for warehouse, finance, and admin users, and exportable reports - replacing a process that used to live across paper, Excel, and institutional memory. It’s hosted in a modern, secure cloud environment.
Where things stand
The application is live today, and it’s already changed how MAV’s team works day to day. Tracking that used to live on paper and in scattered spreadsheets is now digital and visual, which means it’s no longer bottlenecked through one person’s memory - multiple people can work the process at once instead of waiting on each other, and the confusing, back-and-forth conversations that used to happen when inventory questions came up have largely gone away. MAV’s team estimates the switch has saved many hours of manual tracking and reconciliation work.
The lesson for any business managing job-cost material
When material tracking lives on paper and in disconnected spreadsheets, the real cost isn’t just the extra time it takes - it’s that your financial reports can quietly stop reflecting what actually happened in the field. Nobody has to make a mistake in judgment for that to happen; it’s just what happens when the system connecting “what got used” to “what got booked” is a verbal conversation instead of a recorded transaction.
Frequently asked questions
Why does inaccurate inventory tracking affect job profitability, not just efficiency? When material usage isn’t consistently recorded and communicated to accounting, the cost of what was actually used on a job can fail to get reallocated from a general overhead account to that specific job’s cost. The money isn’t lost - it was already priced into the job’s estimate - but the job-profitability reports become inaccurate, because they no longer reflect what was actually consumed on each job.
What does “digital and visual” actually change about a manual tracking process? It removes the bottleneck of information living in one person’s memory or on a single physical sheet. When inventory status, bin location, and job association are visible in a shared system, multiple people can work the process at the same time instead of waiting on each other or asking around to find out what’s current - which is often where the real time savings comes from, more than any single feature.
Do you need a full history of every inventory movement, or just current status? It depends on the business. Some operations need a complete audit trail of every location change. Others, like tracking material bins for active jobs, mainly need accurate current state - what’s on hand, where it is, and what’s gone out to which job and when - without needing a full historical log of every bin-to-bin movement. Scoping this correctly up front keeps the system simple and fast for the people actually using it every day.
Should a company try to automate everything at once, or phase a project like this? Phasing is usually the more reliable approach. Tackling the piece with the most immediate operational pain first - in this case, receiving and tracking material against jobs - delivers real value quickly and gives both the business and the development team a working system to learn from before deciding what the next phase should include.
Managing job costs across paper, spreadsheets, and someone’s memory? Get a free technology assessment - or read more about how Merit IT approaches Software & AI Development.