Both platforms manage purchase orders well. They do it differently: Procore makes a PO a commitment with a Schedule of Values, Buildertrend makes it a job document coded to QuickBooks. This page compares them on the purchase order workflow specifically, on cost codes, on accounting sync and on how each one actually prices, then covers the gap neither closes: the supplier POs that arrive as PDFs and get typed in by hand on both.
Submit your purchase orders
Drop documents here, or click to file
Up to 50 files per batch
Uploading...
Search this question and you get module checklists written by affiliates. The parts that decide whether the software works on a Monday morning are the shape of the purchase order object, where the cost code has to be mapped, and what happens to the orders you receive rather than the ones you send.
Almost every roundup on this query counts modules. Modules are not the constraint. The constraint is whether the purchase orders you receive can reach the budget the same week they are issued, and neither platform answers that on its own.
A Procore purchase order is a commitment with a Schedule of Values, and a subcontract is a different contract type entirely. A Buildertrend purchase order is a job document tied to a cost code. Migrating between them is not a field for field move.
Procore publishes no figures at all and quotes on Annual Construction Volume. Buildertrend tier prices circulate on comparison sites at three different price points for the same three plans. Budgeting off either is guesswork.
Buildertrend cost codes must be linked to QuickBooks Products and Services, and Procore needs an ERP standard cost code on an SOV line before a commitment can be exported. An unmapped code does not error loudly, it just lands in the wrong place.
Both are built for the purchase orders you originate. The material order a supplier confirms back, the PO a general contractor sends down, the rental order that arrives as a scan: all of that is typed in by hand on either platform.
PurchaseOrders is not a construction management platform and it does not replace either of these. It reads the purchase orders and order confirmations that arrive as PDFs, scans or email attachments and returns the header plus every line as clean columns, so the figures reach whichever platform you chose without being retyped.
The extraction returns a spreadsheet or a JSON payload, not a platform specific connector, so the same output feeds a Procore Schedule of Values load or a Buildertrend job PO. You are not locked into the decision you make this month.
Every line comes back separately with description, quantity, unit price and extended amount, which is the granularity a cost code has to be assigned at. A header only capture can total an order but it cannot code one.
A lumber yard PDF, a scanned rental agreement and a general contractor order form all return the same fields. There is no template to build per supplier, which is the practical difference from coordinate based capture.
Moving onto either platform means loading the open orders you already have. Upload the folder and get one sheet, rather than keying a year of live commitments by hand during go live week.
Because Procore has no native bulk PO import, the API is the only route for volume. Structured JSON is what that route needs, and it is what comes out.
Take the output in the shape the next step wants, whether that is an SOV import file, a QuickBooks facing sheet or a payload your own integration posts.
This is the difference that decides most of the rest. In Procore, a purchase order is not a standalone document. It is a commitment, created inside a project's Commitments tool, and when you create one Procore asks which kind of commitment contract you want: a Purchase Order or a Subcontract. Purchase orders go on the Contracts tab, the header carries contract number, contract company and title, and duplicate contract numbers are not permitted. The line items do not sit on the header at all. They live on the commitment's Schedule of Values, reached from the General tab, where an amount based SOV takes Sub Job, Cost Code, Cost Type, Description, Tax Code and Amount, and a unit based SOV adds Quantity, UOM, Unit Price and Subtotal.
Buildertrend treats a purchase order as a job level document tied to a cost code, created against a job and issued to a sub or a vendor, and it sits alongside estimates, bids, change orders and the budget in the same financial area. There is no separate contract object standing between the job and the order. For a residential builder running twenty active homes that is simpler and faster. For a commercial general contractor who has to distinguish a material order from a subcontract with retainage and compliance documents attached, Procore's split is the reason the extra structure exists.
Both platforms are only as good as the cost code they write onto the line, because that code is what turns a purchase order into job cost. Buildertrend links its cost codes to your accounting file directly: you open Cost Codes in Company Settings, choose Import, select QuickBooks, and pick the QuickBooks Products and Services to bring across, then link each one to an existing cost code or create a new one. That linkage is not optional housekeeping. If a cost code is not mapped, the job cost does not land where you expect on the other side.
Procore requires an ERP standard cost code on at least one Schedule of Values line before a commitment can be sent to accounting at all, which is a harder gate but a more predictable one. The practical consequence is the same in both: the code has to be right on the line, at the moment the order is entered. That is exactly the step that breaks when somebody is copying a supplier PDF into a form by hand at four in the afternoon.
Procore's company level ERP Integrations connect to Viewpoint Spectrum, Vista, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Sage 300 CRE, Sage 100 Contractor, Sage Intacct, Yardi Voyager, NetSuite, Acumatica, MRI Platform X, CMiC, Workday and Xero. Approved commitments are exported for accounting acceptance, and after export the contract company, title, status and default retainage are locked. Procore is explicit that each connector has its own feature set and yours may not support a given action, so the list is a starting point rather than a promise.
Buildertrend's accounting story is narrower and, for the firms it targets, deeper. It syncs estimates, invoices, purchase orders, payments, customers, vendors and job costs with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, provided you have linked cost codes, jobs, internal users and subs or vendors to their matching records on the QuickBooks side. If your books are in QuickBooks and you build houses, that is a shorter path than any ERP connector. If your books are in Sage 300 CRE or Vista, Buildertrend is not the tool.
One detail worth knowing before you commit either way: on the Sage 300 CRE connector, Procore states that once a project is synced, commitments must always be created in Procore rather than in Sage. That turns the speed of getting orders into Procore into an accounting problem as well as a project one, which is the whole reason the data entry question below matters.
Neither vendor publishes a price you can rely on today, and that is the single most useful thing to know before you spend a week comparing feature grids.
Procore is direct about the model on its own pricing page: "Pricing for Procore depends on the products you need and the amount of construction you do," and "We charge an upfront annual fee by product and based upon your Annual Construction Volume (ACV), the aggregate dollar value of the construction work across your projects." No dollar figures appear anywhere on that page. The contract includes unlimited users, unlimited data storage, support and product enhancements at no additional cost, which matters more than it sounds: a per seat comparison against Procore is not a like for like comparison, because Procore does not charge per seat.
Buildertrend's tier names circulate widely on third party sites with confident monthly figures attached, and those figures do not agree with each other. You will find the same three plans quoted at three different price points on three different comparison blogs published in the same year. Treat every number you read on a site that is not Buildertrend as stale. The only current price is the one in the quote you are given.
The honest summary is structural rather than numeric: Procore is priced against how much construction you put through it, Buildertrend is priced against plan tier, and both now route serious buyers through a quote. Budget for implementation separately in both cases.
Buildertrend is aimed at residential builders, remodelers and specialty contractors running smaller to mid sized projects, and its interface reflects that: client facing selections, daily logs, scheduling and homeowner communication are first class citizens. Procore is aimed at commercial general contractors, larger self performing firms and developers, where the volume of drawings, RFIs, submittals, compliance documents and subcontract administration is the actual problem.
The usual mistake is to pick on feature count. A remodeler who buys Procore gets a lot of machinery for managing subcontract risk they do not carry, and pays for construction volume they do not have. A commercial GC who buys Buildertrend runs out of contract structure the first time a subcontract needs retainage, compliance tracking and a change order chain. Match the tool to the contract type you actually sign.
Here is the part the feature grids skip. Both platforms are excellent at purchase orders you originate. Neither reads a purchase order or an order confirmation that arrives as a PDF from a supplier, a lumber yard, an equipment rental house or a general contractor above you.
That matters because of how the paperwork actually moves on a job. A specialty contractor receives POs from the GC. A supplier sends back an order confirmation with substituted items and revised pricing. An equipment house emails a rental order as a scan. None of that arrives as structured data, and none of it enters Procore or Buildertrend without somebody typing it, line by line, onto a Schedule of Values or a job PO form with the right cost code attached.
Procore's own import path makes the limit clear. The Schedule of Values CSV import fills the SOV of a commitment that already exists: you open the commitment, go to General, then Schedule of Values, choose Edit, then Import SOV from CSV. There is no native CSV or Excel import in Procore that creates purchase order records in bulk. For bulk creation the path is the REST API, where purchase orders are purchase_order_contracts, with line items underneath at /rest/v1.0/purchase_order_contracts/{id}/line_items, and batch work goes through the PATCH .../sync variants that accept up to 1000 resources per call. Either way, something has to produce the rows first.
That is the job turning purchase order PDFs into Procore commitment data does, and the same extraction feeds a Buildertrend workflow just as well, because the output is a spreadsheet or a JSON payload rather than a platform specific connector. Construction teams comparing the two usually land here from construction purchase order software, take the header and every line as columns through the purchase order PDF to Excel converter, and clear a backlog of open orders during a migration with bulk purchase order upload. Because the cost code follows the line rather than the header, purchase order line item extraction is what makes the job costing correct, and teams wiring an orders mailbox into their own integration take the same fields as JSON from the purchase order API. Firms whose books sit under Buildertrend rather than an ERP usually pair it with the purchase order to QuickBooks route.
To be plain about the boundary, because it is the honest thing to say on a page like this: PurchaseOrders is not a construction management platform and it does not compete with Procore or Buildertrend. It does not schedule, it does not manage RFIs or submittals, it does not track compliance documents, and it does not approve, receive or match anything. It reads purchase orders and order confirmations that arrive as documents and returns the header plus every line as clean columns. Whichever platform you pick, the typing that happens before the import is the part we remove.
Feature for feature on the things that decide how purchase orders behave. Where one platform is genuinely better, the table says so.
| What | Procore | Buildertrend | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purchase order object | A commitment inside a project, typed as Purchase Order or Subcontract | A job level PO tied to a cost code | Procore separates material orders from subcontracts; Buildertrend does not |
| Where line items live | The commitment's Schedule of Values, amount based or unit based | On the purchase order against a cost code | Procore adds Sub Job, Cost Type and Tax Code fields to every line |
| Accounting and ERP | Spectrum, Vista, Sage 300 CRE, Sage 100 Contractor, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Acumatica, CMiC, Yardi, Workday, Xero | QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop | Connector feature sets differ; verify yours before signing |
| Cost code setup | An ERP standard cost code is required on an SOV line before export | Cost codes are imported from and linked to QuickBooks Products and Services | Both fail quietly if the code is not mapped |
| Bulk purchase order creation | REST API only, purchase_order_contracts with sync endpoints up to 1000 per call | No native bulk PO import | Procore SOV CSV import fills an existing commitment, it does not create one |
| Reads supplier PDF purchase orders | No | No | This is the gap both leave open, and where the data entry hours go |
| Pricing model | Annual fee by product, based on Annual Construction Volume, unlimited users included | Plan tier, quoted | Neither publishes a number you can rely on; third party figures are stale |
| Built for | Commercial general contractors, larger self performing firms, developers | Residential builders, remodelers, specialty contractors | Match the tool to the contract type you sign |
Procore details are from Procore's own commitments, ERP integration and pricing documentation. Buildertrend details are from Buildertrend's QuickBooks integration help articles. Neither vendor publishes a price on its site, so no dollar figures appear in this table by design.
This is the workflow that stays the same whichever platform you pick, which is why it is worth solving before you sign.
Drop in the PDF, the scan or the email attachment. Material orders, subcontractor quotes turned into POs and equipment rental forms all work, and a mixed batch is fine.
Tip: Start with the vendors that send the most orders, because that is where the rekeying hours actually sit.
PO number, vendor, job reference, dates and each line come back together, so you can assign the cost code once against accurate figures rather than reading a PDF in one window and typing in another.
Tip: Confirm the line count against the paper order before exporting. A missed line is a miscoded job cost.
Take Excel or CSV for a Schedule of Values load or a job PO entry, or JSON when your own integration posts to the Procore commitments API.
Tip: Keep the vendor order number and your internal PO number in separate columns. Merging them makes reconciliation impossible later.
It depends on the contract type you sign. Procore is better when you need material purchase orders and subcontracts kept as separate contract objects, each with a Schedule of Values, change orders and compliance documents. Buildertrend is better when purchase orders are job level documents coded straight to QuickBooks and the extra contract structure would only slow you down.
Procore does not publish prices. Its pricing page states that pricing depends on the products you need and the amount of construction you do, and that it charges an upfront annual fee by product based on your Annual Construction Volume, the aggregate dollar value of construction across your projects. Unlimited users, data storage and support are included, so per seat comparisons against Procore are misleading.
For a small residential builder, generally yes, because Buildertrend is priced on plan tier while Procore is priced against annual construction volume. But neither publishes a reliable current number, and the Buildertrend tier prices quoted on third party comparison sites disagree with each other. Get both quotes before deciding on cost.
Yes, though it is not called that. Purchase orders live in the project level Commitments tool, where you choose Purchase Order or Subcontract as the commitment contract type. Line items sit on the Schedule of Values rather than on the header, and the contract must be Approved or Complete before you can raise change orders or invoices against it.
Not through a file. The Schedule of Values CSV import fills the SOV of a commitment that already exists, and there is no native CSV or Excel import that creates purchase order records in bulk. Bulk creation goes through the REST API at purchase_order_contracts, with the PATCH sync endpoints accepting up to 1000 resources per call.
Yes. Buildertrend syncs estimates, invoices, purchase orders, payments, customers, vendors and job costs with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop. It requires that cost codes, jobs, internal users and subs or vendors are linked to their matching QuickBooks records first, and cost codes are imported from QuickBooks Products and Services.
They are two commitment contract types with different fields. A purchase order carries assignee, bill to and ship to addresses, ship via, payment terms and delivery date, and moves through Draft, Processing, Submitted, Partially Received, Received, Approved and Closed. A subcontract, called a work order contract in the API, carries contract start date, completion dates, inclusions and exclusions, and runs Draft, Out For Bid, Out For Signature, Approved, Complete, Terminated and Void.
No. Both create purchase orders you originate; neither extracts data from a purchase order or order confirmation that arrives from a supplier or a general contractor. That document has to be typed in by hand, line by line, with the cost code assigned as you go, which is the step this tool removes on either platform.
Procore. Its ERP Integrations cover Viewpoint Spectrum, Vista, Sage 300 CRE, Sage 100 Contractor, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Desktop and Online, NetSuite, Acumatica, CMiC, Yardi Voyager, Workday and Xero. Buildertrend integrates with QuickBooks Online and Desktop. Note that once a Procore project is synced to Sage 300 CRE, Procore states that commitments must always be created in Procore rather than in Sage.
Turn supplier PO PDFs into Procore commitment and SOV data.
Construction purchase order software for material and sub POs.
Header and every line as a clean spreadsheet.
Line level detail, which is where the cost code goes.
Clear open orders during a platform migration.
JSON for the Procore commitments API path.
For firms whose books sit in Sage Intacct.
The general load pattern for any construction ERP.
