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The Right Job Management System for Your Trade Business Can Lead to Real Dollar Gains
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Michael Alexander
Share 25 November 2021
Trades customers today expect an efficient and informative experience when dealing with tradies and place high value and loyalty if they receive it.
But in a world where construction is booming, supply chains are broken and finding quality staff is extremely difficult, providing your customers with a five star service experience can be a major challenge when you are under the pump more than ever to deliver jobs in a timely manner.
Using digital systems to manage new jobs and improve workflow management can help your trade business with this challenge.
Job management systems for tradies
A job management system can help you know what jobs you’ve got on, what jobs are coming up, what stage the jobs are at and if there are any red flags you need to step in and deal with. This means instead of ringing around finding out where everything is at, you’re able to keep your customers informed and manage their expectations.
With the time your business could save by having its jobs and workflow automated, you could make significant savings, which can be re-invested back into customer acquisition or retention initiatives.
If you can save one hour per day by having all your jobs in one central place and not having to rifle through paperwork to track jobs as well other regular activities such as quotes, this can equate to an estimated $20,000 in savings over a year. Think what you could do with that!
The benefits of back-costing for trade businesses
Integrating your job management system and time capturing facilities with your accounting package gives you the tools you need to start back-costing.
As a trades business owner, you need to have the ability to understand the profitability of the jobs that you have completed as this gives you a range of great information to help you run your business, including whether:
Your team is being productive with their time.
Your quote process is accurate.
You have re-scoped projects with add-ons.
Certain types of jobs are more profitable than others.
More importantly, you need to be able to identify the key drivers of profitable jobs compared to those that lost you money. This is what back-costing can help you do.
Improving profitability with job management systems and back-costing
Having accurate profit by job data can lead to real dollar gains and help you accurately forecast out the year ahead, which ultimately helps you plan for growth.
One business I worked with noticed that one of their services was consistently losing money. After looking into it, they discovered this was due to the job taking on average an extra three hours more than they had been quoting for.
They increased their quotes going forward and, with an average of three jobs per week, have increased their weekly profit by $700 without having to change anything else in their operation. Multiply that across the year and that’s a potential $36,400 extra annually in profit!
Download The tradies guide to automating your business for better productivity and profitability
With activity heating up in the trades and construction industry, it’s more important than ever for tradies to save time and maximise efficiencies wherever you can. Streamlined processes enabled by digital systems can help tradies make some real dollar gains.
If you’re ready to get admin work completed faster and efficiently delegate more tasks to your team, download The tradies guide to automating your business for better productivity and profitability to learn how automation can benefit your trade business and what you need to consider when selecting digital systems.
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