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Unpriced Purchase Orders vs. T&M Purchase Orders


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Can anyone provide an opinion as to what the advantages or disadvantages are of a Unpriced Purchase Order (UPO) vs. a Time and Materials (T&M) Purchase Order are?  Both situations the CO would include a NTE on the order.  The situation would be for repair services where the exact costs is unknown at the time of establishing the PO.  I like to use the example of taking your car to the mechanic and they don't know what the costs is going to be at the time as they don't know what the problem is yet.  I am not taking about a situation of paying for a tear down and evaluation PO before establishing a FFP on the repair.  Some vendors don't agree to that and some are traveling to a site to repair so they don't have time to wait for a FFP order after they figure out what the problem is.

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Maybe people still use the unpriced PO but I think this is one area of the FAR that is mostly a hold-over from a bygone era. 

FAR 13.302-1 now indicates that except as provided under the unpriced purchase order method, purchase orders "generally" are issued on a fixed-price basis.   I don't know when that language switched from "shall" (used in a 1995 version). When I started in DoD in the early 80's, our small purchase people issued what are now T-M orders on an unpriced basis and then a poor sole went back, reviewed invoices, and negotiated fixed-prices for each. 

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