A complete practical scenario showing how an outdoor advertising company — road billboards, lit signs, shop fronts — runs its entire work cycle inside Optify ERP with its standard documents and no additional development: a full design loop on the follow-up sheet before any price is mentioned, then pricing and commercial approval, then a tender across several workshops — including the company's own workshop as a supplier — and a "supply and install" purchase order received in five stages with supervision photos, through to handover to the client and collection.
The problem in this sector is not a lack of demand, but that the work passes through four separate worlds — design, pricing, contracting with workshops, and supervising execution — and no single document ties them together. The result is that a billboard's true cost is only known after the project ends, if it is ever known at all.
The client asks for a fourth and fifth revision to the mock-up, with the messages scattered across WhatsApp and email. No one knows how many versions were issued, who approved the final one, or when a revision moved from "within the agreement" to "unpriced extra work".
The client asks for a "preliminary price" while the design has not settled, so a number is typed into an Excel file and then becomes a commitment. The client is quoted before the workshop's execution cost is even known — so the margin announced in the quotation is a guess, not a calculation.
The workshop is usually chosen by habit or relationship, and the price is negotiated over the phone. There is no record of what another workshop quoted for the same item last month, and no benchmark to show whether the company's own workshop is cheaper than the market or has become more expensive.
The supervisor says "fine" on the phone and the stage payment goes out. There is no record of who inspected, when, or what exactly was accepted — so if a defect shows up later, you have nothing left to withhold against.
Everything above becomes a posted document with a status, an owner, a date and a number. Each billboard becomes a cost center that gathers its revenue and expenses, and its true profit is read in a single report.
This scenario needs no new software module. Everything below is a standard setup screen inside the system, configured by the consultant during the first days of onboarding.
The cost center tree is built by site or advertising campaign, and the center is fixed on the sales order and the invoice. This is the key that makes the profit and loss statements and the general ledger filterable by a single billboard.
Supplied billboards by size (3×6, 4×12, shop front), and service items for licenses, administrative authority fees, transport and supervision — so everything the agency buys has an item that can be priced, compared and loaded onto the cost center.
External workshops, the company's internal workshops, printers, crane contractors, electricians. The company's own workshop is registered as a full supplier like any other — with its own quotations, purchase orders and invoices — and is compared with the market in every tender.
Stages the office defines itself by name and order: brief received, design in progress, technical review, sent to the client, revision requested, design approved. Each stage is classified internally — and the stage classified as "opportunity" is the one that opens the commercial track.
Five standard items repeated in every tender: supplying the structure, civil works and foundations, lifting and installation, vinyl printing and installation, lighting and wiring. They are defined as items with no stock balance, becoming a common language that every workshop prices against.
A cycle on the quotation governs commercial approval toward the client, and cycles on the request for quotation, the purchase order and the supplier invoice govern the spending side — so no request is sent and no purchase order approved except by an authorized role, with edit locking in sensitive states.
Note: the number of approval cycles allowed follows the subscription plan — make sure the plan includes them before relying on them in the design.
In-system alerts in the notification bar for sales orders and bank dues for payment and collection, print templates that output the quotation as an official document ready to print or save as PDF, and WhatsApp broadcast through the official Meta interface to send it to the client.
Payment schedule templates apply on both sides: an advance payment from the client before contracting the workshop, and payments to the workshop tied to the staged receipts — so no stage is paid before it is accepted.
The cycle has three tracks: a price-free design track that begins with a CRM request on the follow-up sheet, a sales track that starts from the opportunity the system creates when the design is approved, and a purchasing track that contracts the executing workshop. What links them all is the billboard's cost center: it is fixed on the sales order and its invoice, and on the purchase order and the supplier invoice — so revenue and cost come together in one place.
Here is the essential difference in this sector: the design stage needs no price, and forcing a quotation into it makes you put down a number before you know it, and pollutes lost-quotation analytics with technical revision cycles. So this stage is run entirely on a CRM request that appears on the follow-up sheet as a card on a stage board — with a specification, a brief, attachments and comments, and no financial commitment.
Stages that each office defines itself by name and order — not a fixed list in the system.
The follow-up sheet shows requests in three views: cards, a list, and a stage board on which the card is moved by dragging. Each stage shows its card count — so bottlenecks are seen before they turn into delivery delays.
A request can be linked to a parent request, so each revision cycle becomes a numbered CRM-REQ linked to the original brief. The chain of revisions is read in the "Linked" tab instead of being a thread on WhatsApp.
The comments tab keeps each round's feedback with its author and time, and the attachments tab holds that round's mock-up file under the same request number — so the third version never gets mixed up with the fifth.
The request is assigned to a specific owner, and the tasks tab holds the execution assignments linked to it, with their deadlines. Alongside an expected completion date that is compared with the actual one.
Every move between stages is recorded in the activity log with its time and author, with the last stage update date shown on the card. So "how many revision cycles?" and "how long did each round take?" become questions with numeric answers.
When the card is moved to a stage classified as "opportunity" or "quotation", the system creates the sales opportunity automatically, links it to the request and qualifies the prospect. The moment the design is approved is the same moment pricing starts — with no re-entry.
The billboard is bought ready-made under a "supply and install" contract from an executing workshop. The agency's role here is not operations but tendering, supervision and receiving. The same approved specification is sent to several workshops at once — including the company's own workshop as a supplier — and the quotations are compared item by item before any spending is approved.
The specification approved in the design loop becomes a request for quotation with its five items, sent to the group of qualified workshops. Everyone prices the same items with the same description — which is what makes comparison possible in the first place.
The workshops' quotations are shown in a single comparison screen: each item's price at each supplier, the total, and payment days. The decision is made on figures shown side by side, not on the purchasing manager's memory.
The winning workshop's quotation becomes a purchase order with one click. Its items are the execution stages themselves — structure, civil works, lifting and installation, vinyl, lighting — so each stage has its own contractual value and can be received on its own.
As each stage is completed on site, the agency's supervisor inspects it and a receipt is issued for that item alone. The system tracks the received and invoiced quantity of each item separately, so it is always known what has been received, what has not yet been received, and what has not been invoiced.
The workshop's invoice is recorded against the purchase order and loaded onto the billboard's cost center. The purchase order status moves automatically: to receive and bill, then to bill, then completed.
When the company's workshop is registered as a supplier and prices in the same tender, its price difference against the external workshops shows on every project. So you learn — by a figure, not an impression — when internal execution is cheaper and when it is not.
Each item on the purchase order has a received quantity and an invoiced quantity that are independent of each other. So a delayed stage shows up as an item not yet received, not as a line in meeting minutes.
The request for quotation, the purchase order and the supplier invoice — all three accept approval cycles with roles. So no one commits an amount to a workshop without going through whoever has the authority to approve it.
When the executor is an external party, the moment of receiving is the moment of truth: it creates the financial obligation toward the workshop, and the client's claim is built on it. The system surrounds it with three standard layers — documenting acceptance, tying payment to it, and keeping the proof on the document itself.
Every accepted stage translates into a receipt for its item on the purchase order. Acceptance is an event with a document number, a date and an issuer — and a stage that is not accepted stays an open item for which the supplier is owed nothing.
Each item on the purchase order has a received quantity and an invoiced quantity that the system tracks independently. So matching the workshop's invoice is done against what was actually accepted, not against what was contracted — and a stage that has not been received cannot slip into a payment.
Stage photos, the night-lighting test video and the structural inspection certificate are attached to the receipt, the purchase order and the client delivery note — so they stay attached to the document they belong to, and are available for any later review without searching.
"Al Ofok Advertising" — a fictional company in this scenario — contracted with a client for a two-faced road billboard on a main axis for EGP 335,000, then tendered the execution to three workshops. The figures below are illustrative, in Egyptian pounds, and are meant to show how the tender decision shapes the margin.
| "Supply and install" item | External workshop A | Company workshop | External workshop C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supply and fabrication of the metal structure | 126,400 | 118,000 | 121,700 |
| Civil works and concrete foundations | 23,900 | 21,500 | 22,800 |
| Lifting and installing the structure (crane included) | 29,600 | 28,000 | 31,200 |
| Vinyl printing and installation — two faces | 20,300 | 19,400 | 18,900 |
| Supply and installation of lighting and wiring | 36,600 | 34,600 | 34,700 |
| Quotation total | 236,800 | 221,500 | 229,300 |
| Item | Value | Receiving status |
|---|---|---|
| Supply and fabrication of the metal structure | 118,000 | Received |
| Civil works and concrete foundations | 21,500 | Received |
| Lifting and installing the structure | 28,000 | Received |
| Vinyl printing and installation — two faces | 19,400 | Received |
| Supply and installation of lighting and wiring | 34,600 | Received |
| Purchase order total | 221,500 | Completed |
| Item | Value | Source inside the system |
|---|---|---|
| Executing workshop's invoice | 221,500 | Supplier invoice on the cost center |
| Licenses and administrative authority fees | 27,000 | Service item on a separate purchase order |
| Transport, site insurance and supervision | 5,900 | Service items on the cost center |
| Total billboard cost | 254,400 | Cost center expenses |
| Contract value with the client | 335,000 | Sales order and sales invoice |
| Gross profit — 24.1% | 80,600 | Profit and loss filtered by cost center |