The Price You Already Agreed

In February the facilities team spends three weeks negotiating a two-year agreement for cleaning supplies. Forty items, an agreed unit price for each, a total value the board signed off. Bin liners come to 12.00 a roll. In August a site office runs short, and a coordinator who joined in June does what the procurement policy says: she sends a quotation request to three suppliers. The framework supplier replies at 14.50. It is the cheapest of the three, so it wins, it is approved, and it becomes a purchase order. Every step was correct. The agreement was simply never consulted.

Nobody in that chain did anything wrong, and the organization still paid twenty per cent above a price it had already secured. The supplier did nothing wrong either, strictly: they were asked for a quote, and they gave one. The failure is that the agreement lived in a signed file, and the order was raised in a system that had never heard of it.

What a framework agreement is for

A framework, a blanket order, a standing offer, a price agreement — the names vary and the bargain is the same. You commit volume, or at least the prospect of it, and in exchange the supplier commits to a price for a period. The negotiating happens once, at the start, when you have leverage and attention. After that, every order is meant to be administration: pick the items, state the quantities, receive the goods.

That bargain is only worth anything if each order actually starts from the agreed price. An agreement that is not on the screen where orders are raised is a document, and documents are consulted by people who remember they exist. The person who negotiated it remembers. The coordinator who joined in June does not.

Three ways an agreement leaks

All three have the same root. The agreement is not a record the ordering process reads, so it cannot price an order, cannot object to a price, and cannot count what has been drawn. Fix that, and most of the leaking stops without asking anyone to remember anything.

An agreed price that the order screen cannot see is a price somebody has to remember. The whole point of agreeing it was that nobody would have to.

A call-off is a quotation that arrives already priced

In AWRA OpsHub an agreement is a supplier contract. It names the supplier, carries a number and a title, a start and an end date, an optional value ceiling, and a renewal notice period. Its catalogue is a list of items, each with the agreed unit price and, if you want one, a maximum quantity that may be bought under the contract. A contract can be draft, active, expired or terminated, and it is in force only when it is active and today falls between its dates.

To order against it, you open the contract, enter quantities beside the catalogue lines and raise a call-off, on the web or from the mobile app. What that creates is deliberately ordinary: a pending quotation from that supplier, priced line by line from the catalogue, marked as the contract’s. Behind it the system files the requisition and the quotation request the rest of procurement expects to find, both already marked complete and noted as priced from the contract rather than tendered — because the decision they would record, who supplies this and at what price, was made when the contract was signed.

1. Raise the call-off

   Anyone allowed to raise purchase requests enters quantities against the contract’s items. The quotation is created at the agreed prices, and the call-off is recorded in the audit log under their name.

2. Approve the quotation

   Someone with permission to approve quotations approves it, exactly as for any other quote. If your workspace has approval rules by value, they decide whether that press is the award or one step of a chain. If it has budget control switched on, the budget check runs here.

3. Raise the purchase order

   The order follows from the approved quotation by the usual step, under the usual permission. Receiving and matching the supplier’s bill work as they do for any order.

That is also why a call-off is easy to audit. It is a quotation, so it appears in the quotation register, carries a link back to its contract, and states on its page that it was priced from the contract and not tendered. Anyone reviewing spend sees the same documents they would see for a tendered purchase, with the reason the tendering step was skipped written on them.

What a call-off refuses

The contract earns its keep at the moment a call-off is raised, because that is when it can still say no. Each refusal comes back as a sentence the person can act on, and nothing is created when one fires:

• A contract not in force today — a draft, an expired or terminated one, or one whose dates do not cover today. Nothing can be called off it.
• An item that is not on the contract. The catalogue is the list of what was agreed; anything else goes through ordinary sourcing.
• Part of a unit. Call-offs are in whole units of each item.
• More than an item’s cap. If a line carries a maximum quantity, the call-off is refused past it, and the message says how many more may still be bought.
• More than the ceiling has left. The call-off’s total is checked against what remains, and the message gives both figures.

How the ceiling is counted

The interesting question about a ceiling is not whether to have one but what draws on it. The obvious answer is “what has been ordered”, and it is subtly wrong for a ceiling that is meant to stop something. If only approved or ordered call-offs counted, two coordinators could each raise a call-off on the same afternoon, each would fit in what was left, and together they would overrun it the moment both were approved.

So every call-off that has not been rejected or cancelled draws on the contract, including the ones still waiting for approval. A pending call-off has already claimed its share. Rejecting it gives the share back. The same rule applies to per-item caps: quantities on live call-offs count against the cap from the moment they are raised.

Two consequences of this choice are worth knowing before you rely on it. The figure drawn is the value of the call-off quotations, not of what was later received or invoiced, so a delivery that comes short does not hand back the difference. And the ceiling counts call-offs only. A quotation from the same supplier raised through ordinary sourcing, outside the contract, does not draw on it — which is exactly the case the next check exists for.

The quote that ignored the agreement

Go back to August. The coordinator sent a quotation request instead of calling off the contract, and the framework supplier quoted 14.50 for a roll agreed at 12.00. With a contract on the system, that quotation’s page now opens with a warning: priced above this supplier’s contract, bin liners at 14.50 against an agreed 12.00 — consider calling off the contract instead. The same comparison is returned over the API with the quotation.

The check is precise about what it compares. For every line on a quotation that is not itself a call-off, it looks up the agreed price for that item from that same supplier on any contract that is active and in date today, and takes the lowest if there is more than one. A line above that price is listed. A line at or below it is not, and an item the supplier has no contract for is not compared at all.

It compares only the same supplier, on purpose. Another supplier quoting more than your framework rate is not breaching anything; that is a competing quote, and the evaluation of competing quotes is a different job, covered in Three Quotes and No Way to Score Them. What the variance catches is narrower and more pointed: a supplier who has already agreed a price, offering the same item to you for more.

And it is a warning, not a refusal. There are honest reasons to accept a price above the contract — delivery to a remote site the agreement did not contemplate, an emergency order outside normal lead times, a specification that has quietly changed. Blocking every one of them would push people back to raising orders outside the system. The warning puts the agreed price in front of the person approving, at the moment they approve, which is when the question is cheapest to ask.

Dates, expiry and the renewal conversation

An agreed price has a shelf life, and a contract that silently outlives its dates is how an organization ends up ordering at last year’s price from a supplier who considers the agreement over — or paying this year’s price while the file says otherwise. A sweep runs every morning. Contracts past their end date are marked expired, after which nothing can be called off them and their prices stop being the benchmark for the variance check. Contracts that have entered their own notice window, thirty days by default and anything up to a year, send a notice to the bell of everyone allowed to keep supplier records, once per contract, linking to the contract.

Renewing is an edit, not a separate step. Move the end date and the renewal warning is re-armed for the new date; change the prices and the catalogue now carries the new ones, while call-offs already raised keep the prices they were raised at. If the new agreement is materially different, raising a new contract with its own number keeps the old one as the record of what was agreed then. A contract is held in your workspace’s base currency, as its call-offs are. For the wider question of what else a supplier record does and does not hold — payment days, delivery terms, lead times — see A Supplier With No Standing Terms.

Frequently asked questions