Procurement
Why hydropower procurement breaks in spreadsheets
Budget, BOQ and purchase orders each make sense on their own. The failure happens in the space between them.
- Author
- Rhino Tusk Innovations
- Published
- Reading time
- 6 min read
A construction-stage hydropower project runs three registers that must agree: the approved budget, the bill of quantities, and what has actually been committed through purchase orders. In most projects each of these lives in its own workbook, maintained by a different person, updated on a different cadence.
Individually they are accurate. Together they drift. By the time a variance is noticed, the commitment has already been made.
The failure is structural, not clerical
It is tempting to treat the gap as a discipline problem — better templates, stricter reporting. In practice the drift is structural: nothing in the process forces the three registers to reference the same identifiers.
A purchase requisition raised against a BOQ item should not be approvable without checking remaining budget on that head. When that check is manual, it happens late or not at all.
What to change first
Start by giving budget heads and BOQ items stable identifiers, then require every requisition to reference one. Even before a full platform, that single constraint removes most reconciliation work.
The rest — approval hierarchy, store issue against activity, variation tracking — follows from having a shared spine to attach it to.
