Purchasing is the process of figuring out how to buy the things that you need to buy and following through with that purchase.

Purchasing is actually a pretty difficult process in bigger institutions and groups - it is not as simple as the purchases you make in normal life. In an ideal world we would have a full time employee dedicated to help us do purchasing but sometimes economic or other factors prevent us from having one single person to go to. Larger groups have to live with this cost and is part of the difficult of growing a group.

This page is meant to give an overview of the complicated purchasing process so that you can understand what is happening.

To make a purchase, you have to go through the following steps:

1. Identify what you want to purchase
2. Estimate how much things will cost
3. Choose the account that you will be using to purchase

Best Practices:

1. CC Dr. Kuh on purchasing correspondence
2. If you can, call the company to look for the campus sales rep. If there is one, deal with them directly to get quotes for purchasing.

Problems:

1. Multiple types of accounts
2. Multiple points of contact
3. Personnel changes
4. No local UH foundation contact anymore

Types of accounts:

1. UH Foundation
2. Departmental Funds
3. College Funds

1. Set up purchasing parts spreadsheet
   1. Try to use Vendors that take Purchase Orders (POs) or whatever is compatible with Accounts (Adafruit and Digikey)
   2. Major things to include
      1. Part Name, Vendor, Link to Part/Part Number, Unit cost, Quantity, Total Cost, Reasoning/Who requested it
2. DL Spreadsheet → Edit to be reasonable
   1. Check for crazy purchases - ask the person who requested it
   2. Edit amount of parts to fit the budget
   3. Check to make sure we fit the PO
3. Send to Dr. Kuh for approval
   1. Make sure to CC [email protected] as well as current PM
   2. Include which account you will be using for which purchases
4. Create the price quotes for the order
   1. Some vendors have ways to create your own “wishlist” that can be used
   2. Others have a cart that can be used as well
   3. Ex. Digikey can use the cart, Adafruit has the wishlist option
   4. Print order total INCLUDING shipping estimates - as PDF
5. Send the PQ's Lori/Gail/whomever the account holder to order
   1. NOTE: This was the