Understanding Areas

An area is a grouping that home builders use to specify a group of communities that share a commonality, such as a geographic territory. Large home builders might have many areas within their organizational structure. Smaller, regional builders might operate their entire organization using a single area.

To further cost savings, you can use national purchasing to set up a national / commodity based approach to procurement. National purchasing provides a separate hierarchical structure from the standard area, community, phase setup. The national purchasing functionality is applicable to both bids and takeoffs. When you use national purchasing, you have more leverage with suppliers to negotiate contracts on a global basis to get the best pricing possible, while still allowing for overrides at the community level.

To set up areas and national purchasing areas, access the User Defined Codes program (P0004A) to add values to user-defined code (UDC) table 00/05.