Whether you're working on three large projects a month or hundreds of small orders, job costing is a huge part of your business.
But with so many solutions on the market and many ways to stay organised, job costing can mean something different in every business. While businesses can certainly get by with multiple spreadsheets and programs, one thing is certain: having a central point of truth is critical to having an accurate idea of what is happening and to help scale your business.
Here are the top three ways your business can benefit from an all-in-one job costing system.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. While it doesn’t seem like a big deal to have stock management recorded in one place and quotes in another, there are some serious invisible issues that could be present in your business.
Firstly, time loss. While it might only be a couple of minutes of cross-checking and loading different programs per person per project, it’s staggering how quickly this can add up. It’s time you’re paying your team for that you could be paying them to produce output or chase new work.
Secondly, if your billing and stock systems are separate, you may be using more than you’re charging for. If the team responsible for generating invoices has no visibility over what was used in a project, they have no way of knowing if extra supplies were needed or extra time used. You could be losing money simply because the visibility is not there.
Having combined stock control and invoicing software, along with countless other tools together, allows you to circumvent these issues. You and your team can have clear visibility of the profitability of each project, without spending extra time collecting this information.
A really huge benefit of having everything in one place is the time you save When your records can ‘talk’ to each other, it saves your team from double handling information. For example, in WorkGuru.io you can use a stock item on a job, and it will update your stock on hand numbers for your whole team.
It’s surprising how much time you’re team are spending without realising. Just by having to go and physically check stock, or look at more than one record for the right answers, you can be wasting minutes every time you need \new info. Over time, this adds up to a lot of time that can be saved by having your information in one stop.
With an all-in-one job costing system collecting and understanding your project’s data becomes a much easier task.
Your team only needs to learn one tool to report information which makes it easier to onboard new staff in all departments and to cross-skill your existing team. With easy to use tools, you’re likely to get more accurate input from your team than if they need to update a few sources at the same time.
When it comes to reporting, all-in-one tools make it easier to pull the information you need with minimal effort. WorkGuru even has real-time dashboards so you can check in on the health of your projects with just a few clicks.
Understanding invoicing, profitability, time spent, stock used and contractor time spent becomes a simple matter when it is all together and easy to digest.
Watch an overview of WorkGuru’s Job Costing Tools
Growing your business is an expensive job. As you grow your team or win bigger projects, the tools and software you need seem to just cost more and more money. But you don’t need to be forking out to multiple companies to keep your business afloat.
An all-in-one job costing system can help you to consolidate the costs of a stock system, CRM, invoicing and quoting tools into one payment. It can even help to provide you additional benefits and features that your business can use, such as reporting tools, in a way that separate systems would struggle to keep up with.
WorkGuru was built to be a complete solution for companies that design, build, or fix things. Servicing the manufacturing, construction, engineering, and fabrication industries, from lead registration, right through to your final invoice.
If you think WorkGuru sounds right for your business, get in touch with us and request a free demo today. Learn more: Read our guest blog from Laurus Bookkeeping “Job Costing Software is not one size fits all: identifying your unique industry needs”