Frequently Asked Questions

materialpro is AI-powered construction procurement software. Three things it does for you:

• Kill the data entry. Your team burns hours keying quotes and field requests into POs, chasing delivery tickets, and re-typing invoices into accounting. We automate 90% of that. materialpro plugs straight into your ERP and runs every common procurement workflow — from sourcing quotes to matching invoices.

• Tighten cost control. By centralizing every spend, validating prices against budgets and buyout agreements, and catching errors before they cost you, customers typically save 5–10% on materials.

• See everything in real time. Your field crew requests materials from their phone. PMs and field staff see what's ordered and delivered the moment it happens. Accounting clears invoices in minutes, not hours. And you set clear approval rules for POs and invoices.

Most construction firms still buy materials the way they did 20 years ago — phone calls, emails, spreadsheets, and manual data entry. Quotes are scattered across people's inboxes, POs don't match what actually showed up, and invoices sit for weeks because nobody can find the original paperwork.

materialpro puts it all in one place, visible to your whole team. When a vendor sends a quote, our AI reads it and pulls out every line item automatically. When you're ready to buy, the system turns that quote into a PO instantly — no one re-keying anything. When materials arrive, your crew snaps a photo of the delivery ticket. The AI reads the received quantities, and field staff flag any issues straight to the vendor.

The big one is whatever's keeping you up at night — cost overruns, dropped communication, and hours lost to paperwork and data entry. Here's what we usually see:

Your field crew orders materials by calling or texting the office, which causes delays and miscommunication. Delivery tickets go missing, so AP can't match them when invoices land weeks later. You find out about budget problems at month-end instead of the moment they happen. And everyone spends too much time keying data instead of building.

materialpro fixes this by giving everyone a live view of what's going on. PMs see exactly what's ordered, received, and invoiced on their jobs. Field crews request materials right from the site. Accounting clears invoices fast because everything's already coded and matched. And when a budget gets tight, you get an alert in time to do something about it.

materialpro AI shows you which materials you buy the most and how their prices move across the year. Price spikes are often seasonal — so once you can see exactly when a material peaks and dips, you can plan ahead and stock up in your warehouse when it's cheapest.

It also makes it easy to spot which vendors you buy from most, so you can go after volume pricing. And when you take on a new job, you can scan the material list to see which items tend to swing the most in price — then lock in buyout agreements with vendors to cover them.

materialpro AI uses purpose-built extraction agents that read and interpret receipts from any vendor — from big-box building supply chains to your local supplier.

materialpro AI runs different agents for different delivery documents. We have dedicated, purpose-built agents for concrete and asphalt tickets, freight tickets, and standard packing slips. Each one is trained to find the specific data on its ticket type and to handle varied layouts — even handwriting.

materialpro AI uses computer vision to understand a document's visual layout and pull the text within it. That layout, along with the extracted text, is then fed into a large language model trained on tens of thousands of construction vendor documents for reasoning.

The LLM infers the vendor and extracts every line item with its description and pricing. It also reads notes, understands units of measure and conversions, and even infers cost codes where appropriate.

materialpro AI is over 90% accurate. Since some documents contain information that's hard for even a human to interpret, 100% accuracy is unrealistic — but most customers cut manual data entry by more than 90%. And the AI gets smarter over time, learning from your corrections and reading your specific vendors' formats better and better.

We built materialpro as an AI copilot that keeps a human in the loop. When the AI isn't sure about something, it flags it for your review — you might see a line item highlighted because the AI couldn't confidently read the description or price.

You can fix anything the AI missed in seconds, and those corrections help train materialpro AI for next time. Even when some documents aren't read perfectly, customers still typically cut manual data entry by around 90%. The AI catches the vast majority of discrepancies that would otherwise cost you money.

Yes. Our multimodal LLM handles all kinds of vendor document formats with no manual training required — spreadsheets, Word docs, semi-structured files, and more. We custom-trained the model on a wide range of formats, and the system automatically picks the best format for each document and applies the right model.

If you ever hit a format our AI can't handle, just flag it to your customer success manager. We'll make sure it gets added to our training set.

We built dedicated support for separate pricing and shipping units of measure, and we handle the conversion between them cleanly. Set up a buyout agreement in MLF or MSF, then order materials in individual units — studs, track, panels, whatever fits. The system knows each unit's dimensions and converts shipping units into pricing units (MSF or MLF) automatically. Configure it however you like, and use either the shipping or pricing unit when processing delivery tickets and invoices.

Your monthly fee is based on:

1. How many modules you subscribe to (purchase orders, delivery tickets, invoices, receipts, inventory, prefab)
2. Your order or invoice volume

Always included: unlimited users, unlimited locations, one ERP integration, and a dedicated account manager for ongoing support.

If you want white-glove onboarding, there's a one-time training and onboarding fee on top.

Most customers see a return in the first year.

The biggest impact is time saved — PMs and buyers spend less time on data entry and purchasing, AP clears invoices faster, and the field crew stops calling the office.

Cost savings come from preventing duplicate orders and unauthorized spend, catching invoice errors, and tighter budget control. When you catch problems early and correct them, you avoid blown schedules and over-budget jobs.

Better communication and visibility usually mean better project outcomes too. When everyone has live information on material status, schedules stay on track and customer satisfaction goes up.

A better procurement process gives you the foundation to take on more work — and bigger, more complex projects. With live visibility into cost and schedule, you bid more competitively and execute with more confidence.

The data and reporting help you learn from every job to sharpen estimating and operations on the next one. Knowing your true material cost per job, and being able to negotiate better prices on your cross-job volume, makes you a smarter, leaner contractor.

Many customers also find that the professional look of running a sophisticated system helps them win work from larger clients who expect that level of operation.

Timelines vary with company size and complexity, but most customers are trained and live within 30 days. Connecting to your ERP usually takes just a few hours.

Most of the time goes into training your team and tuning your process. We build a custom training roadmap around how many users you have and which modules you're rolling out. Some customers prefer a phased rollout — starting with one department or a few key users before expanding company-wide.

Because materialpro integrates with your ERP and includes training for your team, a traditional "free trial" isn't practical. But a document demo and an integration call give you a very real preview of how the system works with your own data.

Many customers start small — one department or a limited user group — to prove value before going company-wide. You get to see real results without the complexity of a full rollout.

We're also confident enough in the value that we structure our contracts around your success. If the system doesn't deliver the benefits we discussed, that's a problem for us too.

Every customer gets a dedicated customer success manager who runs your training, answers questions, and helps you get more out of the system. These aren't call-center reps — they're experienced team members who know construction procurement and carry a limited number of accounts, so they're never too busy to help.

Your CSM stays with you for the whole contract, so they know your business and your team. Need to train a new hire six months in? Your CSM handles it. Question about a new feature? They're your go-to.

That's a world apart from companies that bounce you to a different rep on every call. We believe relationships matter — especially when you're changing important business processes.

Change management is always a challenge, and we've learned a lot about making the transition smoother. The key is showing quick wins early. When the field crew realizes they can check warehouse stock from the palm of their hand instead of calling the office, they get genuinely excited about the tech.

We train people on their specific role rather than trying to teach everyone everything. A superintendent needs to know different things than an AP clerk. When training maps to each person's day-to-day work, adoption moves much faster.

We also recommend starting with your most tech-savvy or most influential team members. Once everyone else sees those early adopters succeeding, resistance tends to fade fast.

Decisions usually involve a few stakeholders, since materialpro touches several parts of your operation. Your operations leadership, purchasing, and project management teams need to understand the process changes and buy into the new workflows. Your accounting team needs to be comfortable with the ERP integration and how it affects AP. And IT typically wants to review security and technical requirements.

We're happy to demo for different groups and answer the specific questions each team cares about. Getting everyone aligned up front makes implementation smoother and ensures you get the most value from the system.

Budget control is one of the biggest wins customers see. Instead of finding out you're over budget at month-end, you get live visibility the moment spend happens.

The system pulls budgets from your ERP, broken down by cost code and cost type, then tracks committed cost against those budgets the instant you create a PO or log an expense like a receipt. If a PO pushes you to the budget limit on a cost code, you get notified.

PMs always know exactly where a job stands through the job cost report, which shows committed (ordered), received, invoiced, and paid cost for every project in real time — tracked against the budget synced from your ERP or the material list uploaded from your estimating software.

Our reporting gives you visibility most construction firms have never had. View spend by project, vendor, cost code, even material/equipment or time period. The job cost report shows ordered, delivered, invoiced, and paid amounts down to the material and unit level.

Budget vs. actual updates in real time as you create POs and process invoices. Drill from a high-level summary into individual line items to see exactly where the money's going.

You also get detailed pricing intelligence: full-year price history for your materials, plus recommendations on which materials could deliver the biggest savings based on your purchase volume and historical price swings.

Export any report to CSV, Excel, or PDF.

A buyout agreement is the approximate quantity of material you commit to buying from a vendor at a set price.

• Create a buyout agreement straight from a vendor quote
• Order against the buyout using predefined prices and separate delivery dates
• See, at the project level, how much you've ordered and received against the buyout quantity so far
• Authorize your field crew to order from pre-approved buyout agreements and vendors to keep costs in check
• Tag orders by work area or phase (e.g., 1st floor, Zone A) using labels and/or zones
• When you review and approve invoices, materialpro validates line-item pricing automatically

materialpro makes it easy to edit an order you've already submitted to a vendor:

• When editing an order, users can:
- Add new line items or remove previously ordered ones
- Change ordered quantity, unit of measure, or cost code
- Change the order's delivery date and destination
- Set a different delivery date for a specific line item than the main order

• The vendor gets an email clearly listing every change made to the previously submitted order
• Project members are notified of the change (as long as they have notifications on)
• Every change is saved as part of the system's audit trail
• Any change made in materialpro is logged as a change order in your ERP (supported by most ERPs, though not all)

materialpro AI automatically downloads email attachments from your invoice inbox. It reads each PDF or image and splits the file into individual invoices on its own.

Anyone assigned to approve invoices can:

• Review invoices auto-matched to a PO
- The AI automatically spots and highlights issues (e.g., invoice price doesn't match the quote, or you're being billed for items that never arrived)
- Send a problem invoice back to the vendor or an internal team member
- Reference the other invoices and delivery tickets for that PO, all on one screen

• Review invoices that don't match a PO
- Use AI to scan the invoice and create a new order record
- Quickly assign job and cost codes to the new order record
- Or post it to a specific overhead GL expense account

materialpro gives you highly configurable, enterprise-grade access control over both data and user actions:

• Assign users specific roles (project manager, foreman, accountant, etc.)
• Assign users to projects to control which jobs they can access (accounting, admins, and buyers can access all jobs)
• Based on their role, control what each user can do on every job:
- Edit orders
- Upload delivery tickets and receive orders
- Review invoices
- View pricing

The approval system is highly flexible, because every company operates differently. Set different approval levels based on dollar thresholds and job roles.

Orders
• Enable up to 3 role-based approvers (owner, PM, buyer, etc.) before an order is sent to the vendor and exported to your ERP
• Set optional order dollar thresholds (e.g., >$10,000 needs PM approval, >$50,000 needs owner approval)

Invoices
• Enable role-based approvers (owner, accountant, PM, etc.) to control who can approve invoices before they post to your ERP
• Set an optional invoice dollar threshold that notifies a designated role for approval
• Set an optional maximum invoice amount a given role is allowed to approve

materialpro offers a few simple ways to order items that aren't yet in your item database:

• While creating an order, users can simply type a custom item description. materialpro searches the item database for it automatically, and if there's no match, it treats it as a new item.
• When a user creates an order from a vendor quote containing new items, materialpro shows a "New" tag next to each scanned item description.
• Once the order is created, the new items are added to your item database automatically. If order approvals are on, the approver can override a custom description (when it matches an existing item) to avoid duplicates with slightly different wording.

We have a dedicated prefab module for exactly this. Prefab assemblies (for example, a coil in mechanical) are set up at the project level, each with its own bill of materials. When a PM or field worker needs a specific prefab assembly, they request it from the mobile app by selecting the assembly defined at the project level. The prefab manager reviews and confirms the order, and once confirmed, the purchasing team orders the materials from vendors using that assembly's bill of materials.

Prefab orders have dedicated statuses so you can track exactly where they are:

• Material requested
• Material received
• In production
• In QC
• Ready to ship
• Ship now
• Delivery scheduled

As a prefab order moves through these stages, the field crew can see the status without calling the office or the prefab shop. Whenever an order is built and ready to ship, field staff can request it be sent to the site by setting the status to "Ship now."

Final delivery of a prefab order is confirmed in the mobile app, with the option to attach a delivery ticket.

Yes. On top of invoices posted against POs and direct job-cost invoices, we also support:

• Overhead invoices posted directly to a GL account (handled via a special overhead job and cost codes mapped to GL accounts)
• Company-card expense receipts posted as AP payment records (supported by some ERPs)
• Personal-card receipts posted as AP entries for employee reimbursement

To make coding these expenses fast, we've built in several automation shortcuts:

• Assign vendors to a default cost code and GL account
• Route to GL accounts based on order type
• Assign a default project for overhead invoices and expenses

Our system supports posting invoices as direct job cost. Here's how you handle them:

• Create a new order record from the invoice contents
• The AI reads the invoice date, due date, subtotal, tax, and more, and assigns them to the new order
• The AI usually picks the job and vendor automatically, and can even assign a default cost code (based on vendor settings or historical invoices) — correct it if needed
• Want to itemize the invoice and split portions across different cost codes? The AI can line-item the invoice and split it across multiple cost codes with ease
• Or assign the invoice — or an individual line item — to a specific overhead GL account

materialpro AI offers best-in-class support for rental POs. Customers typically create a separate line item for each piece of equipment (for example, a scissor lift) on the PO. Each line can be priced as a one-time lump sum or as a unit price tied to a unit of measure like day, week, or month. To set when a line ends, use a per-line end date — or use a time-based unit of measure to indicate duration (applied from the PO start date). When you reach a line's end date, or the duration period after the start date (if you're using time-based units), the system emails you about the upcoming rental expiration.

You can also run a report by line-item end date to see which POs have rentals coming due.

The system handles every type of purchase. For materials, you get the full workflow from RFQ and quote to delivery ticket and invoice. For equipment, you manage rental agreements with automatic reminders before the term ends — no more surprise charges because someone forgot to return a machine. For services and subcontracts, you track work orders and process AIA invoices against them, with built-in support for retainage.

The system is flexible enough to handle any kind of purchase your business needs — from bulk materials to specialized equipment to subcontractor services.

materialpro offers iOS and Android apps (available in English and Chinese) that let users:

• See the jobs they're assigned to
• Submit field requisitions for those jobs, approved by designated office staff
• Order items from pre-approved buyout agreements
• View all orders on their jobs
• Receive orders in the field by snapping the delivery ticket and capturing any receiving issues
• Reserve a PO number to give a vendor on urgent orders — when the delivery ticket is uploaded, the AI reads it to line-item the PO for the office to review
• Photograph purchase receipts or invoices and submit them for approval
• Check warehouse stock availability (if the inventory module is on)
• Submit order requests for warehouse stock
• Respond to invoice returns — approve or add comments

The app also works offline, which matters on sites with poor cell coverage. Everything syncs the moment they're back online.

Yes — as long as an admin has enabled the permission for field roles to create orders.

• Submit material requisitions from the mobile app or a tablet, choosing items from:
- Pre-approved buyout agreements
- Material lists
- The item database of all previous orders
- Hand-filled material requisitions (scan accuracy depends on handwriting clarity)

• Filter items by keyword, group, or cost code to quickly narrow down a large buyout agreement or material list
• Reserve a PO number for urgent orders. Give the number to the vendor and snap the delivery ticket — the AI reads it to line-item the PO for the office to review

This is fully configurable to how you want to run your business. For each user, you control whether they can see prices. Some companies want a cost-conscious field crew, so they show pricing and budget info. Others want the field focused on getting the right materials without worrying about cost.

Set it up however you like. Field crews might see certain materials pre-approved at a set price, or they might only see quantities and descriptions. PMs always have access to full cost information and can see budget impact in real time.

Yes. materialpro lets users log and report receiving issues on PO line items easily, on desktop or mobile:

• Pick from predefined issue types: damaged, over-shipped, wrong quantity, or other
• Optionally upload a photo to document the issue visually
• The vendor is notified of the reported issue automatically and asked to resolve it (refund, deliver the missing item, or replace the damaged one)
• Use filters to quickly find orders with receiving issues and track them to resolution

The system generates a detailed email to the vendor — creating a written record and getting them working on a fix right away. It also alerts the PM and office team so they know about an issue that could affect the schedule.

That's a huge improvement over the old way, where the field crew called or texted in problems that sometimes got lost or forgotten.

Emergencies happen in construction, and we've built the system to handle them.

Field staff can reserve a PO number from the mobile app without specifying any details — materialpro reserves the number in your ERP.

They then give that number to the vendor. When a foreman or super picks up at the supplier, they just photograph the delivery ticket, and the AI reads it to line-item the PO for the office to review.

Field crews can also walk into a retail store and buy with a company or personal card. In that case, they simply upload the receipt through the app and are prompted for the job number, plus an optional cost code and notes.

Even for urgent purchases, you still get digital tracking and proper job-cost allocation — so from an accounting standpoint, nothing slips through the cracks.

The inventory module lets you track general material stock held in your warehouses, as well as material warehoused for a specific job. See what's in general inventory, what's set aside per job, and every planned inflow and outflow.

Field crews can check stock from their phone before heading to the warehouse. When placing an order, the system can show what's already available in inventory instead of what needs to be bought from a vendor.

When you set up a job warehouse, field staff can see what's been delivered to the warehouse for that job — important for sites that don't have room to store material and route most of it to a warehouse. When field staff are ready to receive material at the site, they request the job-specific stock through the mobile app, and it's handled just like a regular order (tracking received items and so on).

Here's the full inventory feature list:

• Set up warehouses and their stock with a simple file upload
• Transfer stock between warehouses
• Move leftover job-specific stock back into a warehouse
• Place restock orders for a warehouse
• Monitor planned stock inflows and outflows
• Set a minimum restock threshold per item to get notified automatically when stock runs low

• Create a separate warehouse and assign it to a project (in the project details tab)
• Any order placed for that job and delivered to the warehouse goes into this new warehouse (set the "Track inventory" toggle to "Yes" in your order type settings)
• When you're ready to receive at the site, create a new order, choose the job inventory warehouse as the vendor, and add items from it
• Orders set to deliver to the job inventory warehouse are counted only once in the job cost report (the delivery to the site isn't double-counted)
• Move items from the job warehouse to your main warehouse, or back from the site to the job warehouse, anytime you need to

No — and that really matters, because the last thing you want is to complicate your vendor relationships. Vendors need no account, no password, and no special training. They send quotes and invoices the same way they always have: by email.

When there's a receiving or invoice issue, the system emails the vendor a secure link to respond — no login required. They can upload a corrected document or answer the question right through the link.

The goal is to make your internal process more efficient without creating extra work for the vendors you rely on.

Over time, the system builds a complete picture of how each vendor performs. See which vendors have more receiving issues, and which have the most invoice problems.

The reporting also helps you have fact-based conversations with vendors about performance — backed by data, not gut feel or one-off incidents.

Current integrations include:

• Kingdee (金蝶)
• Yonyou (用友)
• SAP Business One
• Oracle NetSuite
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• QuickBooks Online
• Xero
• Digiwin (鼎新)

Using an ERP we don't integrate with yet? As long as it has an API, we can build a custom integration — typically within a few weeks of signing with us.

We have built-in integrations with all the major construction ERPs. The integration is bidirectional — we pull information from your ERP and push it back. We pull your projects, vendors, cost codes, cost types, and budgets, so everything's already set up when you start using materialpro. When you create a PO or approve an invoice in materialpro, it flows back to your ERP with full job and cost coding. Your accounting team never re-enters data.

Using an ERP we don't integrate with yet? As long as it has an API, we can build a custom integration — typically within a few weeks of signing with us.

What materialpro pulls from your ERP:

• Projects (also called "jobs")
• Vendors
• Cost codes (called "phase codes" in some ERPs)
• Cost types
• Equipment and service codes
• Tax codes (by region)
• Job budgets organized by cost code and cost type (optional)
• Existing POs created in the ERP before the customer started using materialpro (optional)

What materialpro writes back to your ERP:

• Purchase orders (itemized with cost code and cost type)
• Invoices (posted against a PO, as direct job cost, or as overhead against a GL account)
• Receipts (as AP payments or AP entries)

We support flexible customization:

• Write custom PO names and descriptions to your ERP (e.g., "Job Number" - "PO Number" - "Notes")
• Custom PO numbering schemes
• Custom invoice descriptions (e.g., "Job Number" - "PO Number" - "Invoice Number")
• In some ERPs, we can even read and write custom fields
• Default PO format: lump sum vs. detailed (orders can stay itemized in materialpro but push to your ERP as a lump-sum PO)
• Master (org-level) phase/cost codes alongside project-specific phase/cost codes
• Custom sales tax handling (e.g., sales tax written as a separate line item, posted against a specific cost code or GL account)
• Custom default payment terms for your invoices
• Whether invoices should auto-export after approval

If you're using an ERP we don't integrate with yet, we can build a custom integration as long as your ERP has an API. These are typically developed within a few weeks of signing with us.

Yes. Everything exports to Excel or CSV, so you can work with the data however you need. Many customers use our reports directly, while others pull the data into their own BI tools or executive dashboards.

Because we integrate with your ERP, financial data flows seamlessly into your existing month-end reporting — you're not creating a separate system that needs reconciling. Everything ties back to your primary accounting system.

We also offer an API you can integrate with your internal systems to read and import data from materialpro programmatically.

Yes. materialpro supports connecting multiple companies within a single ERP instance. Assign users to specific ERP companies, and each user can switch seamlessly between the companies they have access to while working in materialpro.

Yes — multiple companies can be managed under a single contract and one login:

• Pricing is based on the combined volume across all companies in the enterprise
• Each company has its own ERP connection and goes through its own setup (separate cost codes, cost types, etc.)
• Admin users get an enterprise-level login that gives them access to all companies

Start with our case studies. Sort by industry and ERP to see how we work for contractors like you.

After an initial discovery call and product demo, the best next step is usually a document demo, where we use your actual quotes, delivery tickets, and invoices to show exactly how the system works with your real documents. That gives you a much clearer sense of the benefits than a generic demo.

If you have specific technical questions, we can set up an integration demo with our engineers to walk through the details of connecting to your ERP — or get your IT team involved to review security and technical requirements.

We can also arrange a call with a reference customer in your region or industry, who can share their real experience using the system. Sometimes hearing the results from a peer is worth more than any sales demo.

You can absolutely start with a single module. Plenty of customers begin with purchase orders and receiving to get their field crew comfortable, then add invoices a few months later. Others start with the invoice module to help AP, then expand into full procurement.

You can also roll out by department — maybe starting with the branch that has the most purchasing activity, then expanding once you've worked out the process. Pricing scales with the modules and volume you use, so you never pay for features you're not ready to implement.

This approach reduces adoption friction for your team and lets you see quick results in one area before tackling your whole operation.

materialpro has established itself as a leading AI software provider for the construction industry.

• Founded in Hong Kong, focused on serving the construction industry across Hong Kong and Taiwan
• Backed by a strong advisory board of industry leaders
• A large, fast-growing customer base across multiple construction trades
• We've shipped new modules every year since the company was founded

We've also grown the team every year since launch, with active openings across every function.

Take a look at our customer success stories across a range of industries and regions. We're happy to set up a call with a reference customer in your region or trade, who can share their real experience using the system. Sometimes hearing the results from a peer is worth more than any sales demo.

The key differentiators:

• AI-native. materialpro AI uses custom-trained large language models — trained on tens of thousands of construction vendor documents — to read vendor quotes, delivery tickets, freight tickets, invoices, and field requisitions. Competitors rely on standard OCR and can't read delivery tickets, freight tickets, or concrete tickets at all.

• Stronger ERP integration with bidirectional data sync.

• Modular. Use each module on its own. Run the invoice module, for instance, while still creating POs in your ERP. Other software forces you to adopt the entire suite, which makes the transition harder. By adopting one module at a time, you focus training on a single function and roll out faster, with less resistance.

• Built for AP. materialpro AI automates three-way matching (invoice against ordered and received quantities) at the line-item level, not just the invoice header. It also supports return flows to both internal teams and external vendors, making issues easy to report, track, and resolve. And it handles overhead and equipment expenses posted directly to GL accounts.

• White-glove customer success drives onboarding — not basic customer support.