Are you still using pen and paper or basic technology to run your contractor business? Do you lose track of customer information, history, or notes? Do you have trouble identifying schedule availability, dispatching team members, or supplying work orders? Are you handwriting estimates and invoices, losing track of invoice and payment status, or not accepting credit card payments? Using “Pen and Paper” or simple technology to manage your contracting business can cause many issues that cut into your profits and potential for growth. But the right all-in-one business management software designed for your service contracting business can alleviate many issues you face with job scheduling, team member dispatching, customer management, estimate/proposal management, invoicing, payments, and more. With the rise of smartphones and connectivity, technology can help keep your business organized, allowing you to save time, make more money, and grow your workforce. We’ll show you how technology can help solve these common issues.
Customer Management
How do you capture your customer information? Can you easily find relevant customer information, notes, and files when needed? Can you find previous job records, estimates, and invoices for your customers?
Customer relationship management systems allow you to quickly store important customer information ranging from basic contact information to photos and files. Customer profiles allow you to store more detailed information such as email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and also secondary contacts such as a spouse or coworker in a structured and organized way. Keep on top of customer updates with notes and comment logs on their profile that can serve as reminders. Attach any customer files and photos that you may need to reference such as “before and after” photos, photos of the issue to resolve, work orders, blueprints, and more. Gain access to any files and photos you need at the job site on your smartphone.
As jobs and invoices are created for your customer, the job and invoice records are automatically linked to your customer profile, making them easily reachable when needed. Need to check notes from a previous job? Simply open their customer profile and find the previous job record. Customer relationship management systems provide you full access to stored information and related jobs, invoices, and files you need at your fingertips.
Job Scheduling and Dispatching
When creating new job records and work orders, you often need to capture a lot of information, ranging from service location to a detailed description of the issue. Where do you record that information? How do you find an available timeslot? And how do you dispatch that information to your assigned team members?
With job scheduling and dispatching software, you can quickly and easily find available timeslots in your team’s schedules, and then create a job record with all necessary information and files that help get the job done. Once the job record is created, all assigned team members can be automatically notified of the new job record, saving you the time of manually sending them information and allowing them to retrieve all relevant job information on demand from their smartphones. Need to update your team members with new information? Simply update the job record for it to be automatically reflected in the assigned team members’ accounts.
Digital job records and work orders offer 2 way information transmission as well. Are you able to track the status of your jobs as they are fulfilled? Are your team members getting to the jobsite on time? With job scheduling and tracking software, your team members can provide status updates as they start and progress through the job, allowing you to track the status of the job in real-time. With location tracking, you can easily see if your employees arrived to the jobsite on time and if they also left the jobsite when they indicated. From easy dispatching to status updates, digital job scheduling software keeps you and your team members in sync and with the information to get the job done.
Estimates and Invoices
Do you create estimates or invoices for your customers on the spot? How do you modify your estimate or invoice based on changes? After a customer signs off on an estimate, do you recreate the full estimate into a final invoice? Handwriting estimates and invoices at the job site can cause many issues. Not only do handwritten estimates and invoices take a long time to put together, but they are also prone to miscalculations and mistakes. And once you’ve written the estimate or invoice and calculated all of the math, making any changes can require you to start from scratch. Paper invoices are not easily retrievable and are often misplaced without duplicates to restore your information. If a customer wants to retrieve an old invoice from you, how will you find it?
With digital estimating and invoicing mobile apps, you can easily and quickly create an invoice for your customer at the job site with simple taps of a button, and all tax application and math is handled for you automatically. You can also save commonly used services and invoice items to quickly re-use for new invoices, making invoicing even faster. Need to modify an estimate or invoice? With just a few taps, you can automatically adjust your line items and settings to update all of the subtotal, tax, and total calculations. Once your customers are ready to sign off on your estimate, you can collect signatures from your customer right on your mobile phone and then easily convert them to an invoice with a simple tap without recreating the entire record. If you want to provide a copy of the estimate or invoice to your customers, you can simply send them an SMS or email with a PDF of the file attached. This allows you customer to easily search and find your invoices if necessary. Once the invoice is paid, simply mark payment and everything is logged and traceable for any future needs. Digital invoicing systems allow you to save time with faster invoicing and never lose track of your estimates, invoices, or payments again.
While tools to digitize the management of job scheduling, dispatching, customer management, and invoicing can be powerful in themselves, using an integrated solution that combines all aspects into one application allows for less complexity, faster data entry, and maximum traceability into your customer history and workforce activity. Keep all of your data in one secure location that you and your team members can access from anywhere using computers or smartphone mobile apps, allowing you to better serve your customer and get the job done right.
Learn more at www.fieldpulse.com