Ordering materials without losing half a day at the merchant

What a merchant run really costs

Ask most owners how long their engineers spend at the merchant and the answer is 'twenty minutes'. Ask the engineers and you hear about the queue at the counter at 7.30, the item that turned out to be out of stock, the second merchant across town, and the drive back to a job that was meant to start at 8. Half a morning is common.

That time has a price even before you count lost work. In 2026 the median gross hourly pay of full-time electricians was £19.54^[1], and for plumbers and heating installers it was £19.00^[2]. Roofers were at £16.91 and gardeners and landscapers at £14.81^[3][4]. Employer National Insurance, pension, van running costs and the job you could have done in that slot all come on top.

Example: a fictional four-van heating firm finds each engineer spends about 75 minutes a week waiting at trade counters or driving to a second merchant. At around £19 an hour in wages alone, that is roughly £95 a week across the team before overheads, plus about five hours of work that could have been sold. Over a year that is close to £5,000 in wages and around 260 hours of sellable time, spent standing in queues.

Order ahead: the night-before rule

The single habit that saves the most time is placing tomorrow's orders today. Most trade merchants offer online or phone ordering with click and collect or next-day delivery on account, and the counter staff can pick an order overnight that would take them twenty minutes to find with a queue behind you.

1. 01

   Review tomorrow's diary by 2pm

   Whoever runs the diary checks every job booked for tomorrow and lists the materials each needs that are not standard van stock.

2. 02

   Confirm the part with the engineer who surveyed

   A two-minute call or message with photos saves the wrong valve or the wrong size of trunking. If the job came from a phone enquiry, check the make and model the customer gave against a photo.

3. 03

   Place the order against the job reference

   Put the job number in the order reference or purchase order field. It makes invoices easy to match and stops parts for one job being used on another.

4. 04

   Choose collect or deliver

   Use the decision table below. Book delivery slots before the merchant's cut-off, which is often early afternoon for next-day delivery.

5. 05

   Send the engineer a single message

   One line per job: what is ordered, where it will be (van, site, yard or collection point) and the order number to quote.

Collect, deliver to site or deliver to the yard

There is no single right answer. The table gives a starting point most small firms can adapt.

When you choose delivery to site, tell the customer what will arrive, roughly when, and where it should go. A pallet of tiles left on a shared drive causes more complaints than late arrival. If the customer agrees to accept a delivery, record that agreement on the job.

Writing an order the counter gets right first time

• Use the merchant's product code where you can, not a description. 'A 22mm valve' can mean six products.
• State quantities in the unit the merchant sells: lengths, packs, rolls or boxes.
• Name an acceptable alternative for anything that might be out of stock, so the merchant does not ring you on a roof.
• Include your account number, the job reference and who is collecting, with their name.
• Ask for a picking confirmation by text or email, and check it against the order before the engineer leaves the job they are on.
• Keep a list of your top fifty items with codes in a shared note; it makes ordering fast for whoever is covering the office.

Rising material prices and your quotes

Ordering habits also protect your margin. The construction material price index for all work rose 7.2% in the year to September 2026, and 6.2% for repair and maintenance work^[5]. A quote that sits with a customer for two months can easily be priced on old materials costs.

• Give every quote a validity period, such as 30 days, and say that materials are priced at today's rates.
• For larger jobs, order the main items when the customer accepts and the deposit clears, not the week you start.
• If a merchant tells you of a price rise on a key item, update your price list that day rather than at the end of the month.
• Where the customer supplies some materials, agree in writing who is responsible if they are wrong or faulty.

Getting more from your merchant account

A trade account is more than a credit line. Most branches will do far more for a firm that orders in a predictable way, and the time to ask is when you set the new routine up, not in the middle of a busy week.

• Ask the branch for its order cut-off times for next-day delivery and for same-day picking, and put both on the office wall.
• Ask whether the branch will hold a small reserved stock of the items you use every week, so they are never out when you need them.
• Agree how short deliveries and substitutions will be handled: a text before the van leaves the branch is far better than discovering a missing item on site.
• Check that every invoice line carries your job reference. If it does not, ask the branch to add it to the order system, because it is what lets you charge materials back to the right job.
• Review the account once a quarter: the items you bought most, any price changes, and any deliveries that went wrong.

Firms that use two or three merchants often get better service by giving most of their routine work to one branch and keeping the others for specialist items. It also makes the night-before ordering routine simpler for whoever is covering the office.

Deciding who collects what

In many small firms everybody collects their own parts, which means everybody visits the merchant. Giving the task to fewer people usually works better.

1. One person owns ordering each day. In a two-van firm that might be the owner; in a larger firm, the office or a dispatcher.
2. If you have an apprentice or labourer, they collect click-and-collect orders and drop them at sites before the engineer arrives, where practical.
3. Engineers only go to the merchant for unplanned parts found on the day, and they ring the office first so the part can be reserved.
4. One engineer collects for two jobs when sites are close, with a clear note of which bag is whose.
5. Anything collected and not used goes back to the yard, not into the footwell.

This links closely to how you manage the stock carried on each van. If engineers keep going to the merchant for the same fittings, those items belong on the van list, and the guide to van stock management shows how to set one up.

Example: one week before and after

Example: a fictional three-van electrical firm in the Midlands logs merchant visits for a week. Eleven trips, three of them to a second branch because the first had no stock, and two jobs started more than an hour late. The next week the office places all known orders by 3pm the day before, uses click and collect for small parts and books two site deliveries of cable and containment. Merchant trips fall to four, every job starts within its arrival window, and the owner spends one hour a day on ordering instead of three engineers each spending most of a morning.

The real gain is not only time. Jobs start on time, customers see the van arrive when promised, and the engineer who is not fighting a counter queue at 7.30 arrives in a better mood. Before-and-after photos of delivered materials also help settle any question about what arrived, as covered in the photo routine guide.