Whether you’re trying to get your small building company off the ground or have been running one for years now, you know that the hustle doesn’t end when you come home. There’s nothing you’d love more than to wind down with a cold one after a long day on the tools. And yet, as soon as you decide to take a breather, a pile of paperwork on your desk starts calling your name. Quotes to build, invoices to send out, customers to respond to – the list goes on, and you suddenly feel like you’ll never be able to wriggle out from the pressures of running a building business.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
The construction industry hasn’t always been the first to jump on the bandwagon with new tech. Many builders in the UK still prefer to stick to what they know: paper-based processes, accounting software and Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, this lets inefficiencies creep in: double-handling, manual data entry, physical paperwork, lost/missing paper job cards, and so on. This way of working sucks up time that you can’t charge for and also opens up room for errors.
Being able to keep up with the grind is a must-have in construction. Yes, admin is a necessary evil – but if it’s holding you back from taking on new work or closing off old jobs, then tech tools might be the answer for you. If you get software to take manual admin off your hands and eliminate double handling in your business, you will soon be ticking more things off the list in less time, pocketing more cash, and making the workload easier on your staff.
Here are some of the key things you can expect field service management software (aka job software) to deliver for your business:
1. Better visibility over your profits
The reason why most trades businesses suffer is not that their work isn’t good enough – it’s because they don’t have a firm grip on their finances. Whether you’re a one-man-band or you run a team of ten builders, you know how important meeting your bottom line on every job is.
Bid those clunky Excel spreadsheets farewell – the right job software should allow you to see your revenue and your profit and loss on any job at a glance. Once you have a crystal clear view of where your margins lie, it will become much easier to plan your upcoming work and avoid the types of jobs that you don’t make strong profits on. Good job management solutions should also let you rapidly invoice for a job by importing job costs, adding your margins and clicking send, then sync that invoice with your accounting software in real-time.
2. Managing a team becomes a breeze
Job software should let you schedule jobs in the app calendar so that every team member knows exactly where and when they need to be on the day. Beats dozens of phone calls and hurried text exchanges before you’ve even had your first morning coffee, doesn’t it?
Say there’s been an important change to a job someone in the team is working on. No need to call everyone individually – some software solutions even enable you to send push notifications to everyone in the team who needs to be notified ASAP.
3. Custom forms and quotes are created in seconds
Securing new work is key for your business to thrive, but building out new quotes from scratch eats up valuable time (and it’s not even a guarantee you’ll win the work). Luckily, job management software does all the niggly entering of the right materials and costs for you, producing a quick quote or estimate while you sit back and relax.
Any form that you use regularly can be saved as a template which you can then change and reuse as needed, making these repeat actions so much more efficient. And yes, efficiency may sound like a tedious word bandied about by business executives, but in reality, it translates to saved hours, days, and weeks – time that you can now spend with your family or your mates.
4. Your Health & Safety compliance is no longer a headache
A good job management system will allow you to log any Health and Safety hazards so that whoever is working on the site knows what to look out for. When searching for the right job software for you, see if it supports different H&S forms or templates (like Job Safety Analysis or Risk Assessment forms) that you can simply tweak when you need to. Some software solutions even come with contact tracing forms so that you can keep track of everyone who comes in contact with your team on-site or in the office.
