How to know when it’s time to invest in construction-specific software

If you’re a contractor in charge of a growing business, you’ve likely asked yourself the question: “Is it time to invest in construction-specific software?”

Like many of your peers, you may find it difficult to answer, especially during this time of economic uncertainty. After all, new software implementations can be expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive.

So how can you be sure the time is right for such an investment?

Looking at some common problems related to key facets of construction can help—accounting, change order complications and delays are but a few—the more that apply to you, the more likely you are ready to invest in construction-specific software.

It’s likely your team is performing manual tasks that could be automated, increasing efficiency and accuracy.

You may be making decisions based on information that is untimely, inaccurate, or incomplete—eroding profit margins and exposing your company to unnecessary risk.

Accounting

• You spend hours reconciling your books.
• It’s not immediately clear what needs to be billed or paid.
• Field personnel continually call the office or stop by to get information or assistance.
• Closing the books and producing financial statements is a time-consuming, manual process.

Change orders

• You miss change order approvals.
• Your process for tracking change orders is complicated.
• You have on occasion failed to capture the information necessary to submit a change order.

Job costs

• You have a manual process for tracking committed costs to actual costs, and often don’t know actual costs until a job is complete.
• You often fall behind knowing your actual labour costs, which can hurt profitability.
• Some jobs don’t make money. If you had the right information during the job, you could have made a different decision and made a profit.
• You do not have access to information indicating when job costs may soon exceed the budget.

Reports

• Most of your construction-specific reports, such as a certified payroll, are manually created, making it a long workday when you need them.
• You don’t have access to the reports necessary to confirm which jobs or aspects of the work provide the best margin.

Estimates

• You create estimates in spreadsheets, and often miss costs or discover inaccuracies.
• Your process for setting up new jobs from estimates is manual. This requires duplicate data entry when transferring information into accounting to initiate documents, such as purchase orders.
• Tracking how you perform on a job against the original budget is only known after combining numbers.

Project management

• You are not automatically alerted when things need attention, such as insurance about to expire, or outstanding lien waivers.
• You often spend time searching for the most recent project document, such as RFIs, submittals, transmittals, or the latest approved drawings.
• You constantly contact the office for information because you don’t have access to drawings, specifications, submittals, etc.

Service management

• Technicians on site are constantly calling the office for customer site information such as equipment repair history, specifications, operating manuals, and warranty information.
• Critical inventory parts are unavailable to the technician on site, causing delays in repairs and costly purchases from the field.
• Invoicing work orders is both manual and time-consuming, which leads to untimely and inaccurate billings, ultimately causing customer satisfaction issues.
• Scheduling technicians based on current location, skill level, and availability is a highly manual process, leading to costly delays, duplication of effort and inefficient utilisation of resource.
• Delays in billing of work orders is leading to poor cash flow.

Five ways your company will benefit from construction-specific software

If even a few of these issues apply to your business, it’s time to seriously consider investing in construction-specific software.

Once you make the decision to invest in construction-specific software, it can help:

1. Gain stronger and earlier visibility into the actual status of job costs and expected future performance as projects progress.
2. Increase business confidence by connecting construction processes, centralising financial and operational data within one system, delivering strong audit capabilities, and providing managers with construction-specific reports, alerts and more.
3. Eliminate errors and redundancy associated with using multiple, disconnected systems, including Microsoft Excel and Word to manage a business.
4. Enhance communication between the field and the office to keep projects moving forward. Better communication contributes towards earlier visibility on arising issues before they become problems that drain the bottom line.
5. More effectively and efficiently comply with governmental and other reporting requirements specifically affecting the construction industry. It also handles the complexity associated with owner, general contractor and subcontractor relationships.