Is your relationship with your business processes complicated? It can be extremely frustrating if your job costing processes have become complicated or ineffective.
But it's not all lost! You can take some steps to improve your job costing systems and fall back in love. Here are the top 6 things you can do to reset your job costs.
Whether it's a feeling or you have the cold, hard data that says your job costing just isn’t working, you’ll need to dig deeper to find the cause.
Take some time to work with your bookkeeper, business consultant, team or all of the above to get feedback on what’s going wrong. Are there too many steps, and your team is skipping ‘unnecessary’ ones? Perhaps the estimates are wrong, and you’ve been underquoting to win work. Finding the cause of your job pain is the first step to improving your results.
Once identified, you can start working on a solution to your frustrations. The problem will massively change the right way to go about fixing it, but setting aside time to fix the problem is key.
Give yourself a deadline for each phase of this project, and make sure that you’ve assigned a project manager to keep track of the progress and keep on track.
Whether it’s outside consultants to get you started in the right direction or new systems and tools that improve the way you do things, there is nothing wrong with getting outside help to improve your processes and feel the love from your job costing again.
Get tips on setting SMART goals at business.gov.au
If your business has outgrown its existing job-costing tools, then investing in new tools might help you see better results quickly. For example, for businesses that historically used spreadsheets, moving to WorkGuru.io has helped them save time while ensuring they make money on their jobs still.
Is job costing worth the money? Here’s what real people say.
Set objectives that you want to achieve to ensure that your processes live up to expectations in the future. It’s also important to ensure that you have the tools to measure the objectives accurately.
So, if you’re goal is to get a profit margin of 40% on each project, then you need to be accurately able to track what the margin is in finished projects (not just quotes). That means you need to be able to track the actual costs, including materials and time.
The more accurate the data you can collect, the more accurately you can track your success.
Learn more: 4 Tips for setting job costing goals for the new year
Great job costing is not set and forgotten. As your business grows and changes, you must review your processes to ensure you're still getting the most from your job costing tools. To keep feeling the love with your job cost, make sure that you take the time regularly to see if any issues are arising and to fix them before they impact your business.
Your team will be all the tools for most of their day, so getting them on board with the processes can make a huge difference.
If your team finds the steps frustrating or too time-consuming, they may not be recording information as accurately as they could be. The solution might be to simplify the process or motivate your team to use the tools.
By explaining why the reporting is important and how it benefits them, you can get more from your tools without investing in new ones.
Learn more: 4 Ways Job Tracking Software Is Good For Team Morale