But it's not all lost! There are some steps you can take to improve your job costing systems and fall back in love. Here are the top 6 things you can do to reset your job costing.
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 are skipping ‘unnecessary’ ones? Perhaps the estimates are wrong and you’ve been underquoting to win work. Finding the cause of your job costing pain is the first step to improving your results.
Once identified, you can start to work on a solution to your frustrations. What the problem is will massively change the right way to go about fixing the issue, 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 in 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 fast. 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.
To make sure that your processes are living up to expectations in the future, set objectives that you want to achieve. It’s important to make sure that you have the tools to accurately measure the objectives you set.
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 forget. As your business grows and changes, you’ll need to review your processes to make sure you're still getting the most from your job costing tools. To keep feeling the love with your job costing, make sure that you take the time regularly to see if any issues are arising 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 find the steps frustrating or too time-consuming then they may not be recording information as accurately as they could be. The solution might be to simplify the process or to 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 into any new tools.
Learn more: 4 Ways Job Tracking Software Is Good For Team Morale