School purchasing software that shows head office every campus

Multi-campus school procurement means many campuses buying under one set of budgets, contracts and approval rules set by head office. Each campus raises its own requests and takes its own deliveries. Head office needs to see every commitment as it is made, and finance needs every payment tied to an approved order and a recorded delivery.

It tends to break down when each campus keeps its own spreadsheet or emails suppliers directly. Approvals sit in inboxes. Prices agreed centrally get re-typed at each step, and the first time head office sees a term's spend is when the invoices land.

Bollard was first built for exactly this: a school group running procurement across many campuses from one head office. The screens say Campus, Principal and Head Office because those are the words the staff already used.

Approvals follow rules set by amount, campus and role. A routine request inside a campus limit goes to that campus's Principal, and anything above the limit carries on to Head Office. The requester sees the route before submitting, so nobody has to guess who signs what.

The approver sees the whole request on one screen: items, quantities, estimated total, budget code and reason. They decide in one click, on a phone between lessons or at a desk. A rejection needs a remark, which tells the requester what to change.

Yes. Head office and finance see the whole group, while each campus sees only its own records. The separation is enforced with row-level security in the database, so a campus user cannot reach another campus's orders by changing a filter or a link.

The dashboard shows the value in flight at each of the seven stages from request to payment, with a needs-attention queue for each role. When trustees or auditors ask who approved a purchase and when, the append-only audit trail shows every change with its before and after values.

For colleges and universities, Bollard is configured around departments and faculties. A lab technician raises a departmental requisition, the head of department approves it, faculty finance checks the money and the procurement office places the order. Grant and cost-centre codes are checked before the request is sent, so a request against the wrong code stops with the person who raised it.

Capital equipment is tagged apart from consumables. A new fume cupboard and a box of pipette tips can come from the same supplier, but they belong in different budget lines and finance can report on them separately.

Faculties pay different prices because each one buys on its own, in small quantities, from whichever supplier it knows. Nobody compares chemistry's glove order with biology's, so the same item lands at three prices across one university.

In Bollard, the central store pools faculty orders into bulk purchases. Buyers send an RFQ, compare quotations side by side and raise the purchase order from the winner. The agreed price is locked on the PO, and each invoice is checked line by line against it. A padded price fails the match on value, and payment can only be raised once the invoice matches.

Most school groups can control purchasing without a full ERP project. A typical ERP brings the vendor's vocabulary and a long configuration project before approval routing works, and implementation is measured in months.

Bollard is set up in discovery around the way your group already buys. The first campus goes live in about two weeks, and the rest follow once that campus is happy.