There’s a common saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While it’s arguable that not everything necessarily requires measurement to manage it, this principle applies to every business to some degree, including commercial contractors that want to gauge and improve their performance. Despite its importance, reporting is severely underutilized in this and other industries. Many contractors aren’t even using any type of technology to track their operations, with around 73% of data going unused for analytics. Instead, businesses often rely on outdated and manual methods to “report” on their operations, which is highly inefficient and lacks the nuance that makes good reporting effective.
You won’t be able to truly determine how well or poorly your operations are performing without a reliable way to measure your success. While businesses investing in analytical and reporting technology can more effectively report on their activities, the actual analytics and actionable insights gathered often fall short.
Certain systems are extremely limited, offering a minimal number of areas that businesses can report on, with equally limited metrics available to craft manual reports. This makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t, driving the need for better platforms and metrics. More than half of today’s contractors are still relying on Excel spreadsheets to run and report on their operations.
This gap in knowledge was what drove the experts at BuildOps to develop their innovative built-in reporting platform. Given that BuildOps is an all-in-one solution, designed to manage all your operations on system, users can run a report on any given field and any piece of information collected in the system. With one platform to handle it all, you’ll benefit from actionable data collected from all departments, customers, employees, projects, and other components. All of this information is available in real-time, offering up-to-the-minute insights into any and all aspects of your business.
The possibilities for reporting are pretty much endless, but we’ll dive into a few of our customers’ favorites. Some of these are basic must-haves — reports that you’ll commonly find in the industry, but with the difference being the speed, accuracy, and ease of actually pulling the data. Others you may not have seen before (but you’ll soon understand why contractors are using them). BuildOps is purpose-built for the modern commercial contractor, but even residential contractors can benefit from these insights. Let’s get into it.
If you’re in the contracting business, you’re certainly keeping track of quotes the best way you can. Up until now, though, there really hasn’t been a GOOD way to effectively manage, track, and convert more of them to jobs. With BuildOps reports, you can easily track all quotes and the surrounding data. This includes the number of quotes that have gone out, along with close rates, total accepted revenue, number of quotes by customer, and so much more.
Sales managers can easily identify which sales reps are closing the most business, which customers had the most quoted work, and who had the highest acceptance rating. You can also easily measure the total profitability of each customer at a glance, instantly calculating combined revenue (repairs, maintenance, pull-through work) minus total costs.
By tracking various events, you can better understand the efficiency of your operations and gain more transparency that can inform your strategies. Events you can track in BuildOps can be any activities that you want to measure. Some examples of event types could include the number of jobs that are being created, jobs completed, or jobs put on hold. BuildOps users are also able to track invoices issued and visits made. This data can help contractors prioritize the jobs that they’ve already created and follow up on jobs that are currently on hold, increasing efficiency of operation.
Tracking events in BuildOps can ultimately help contractors better understand their customers’ history, including past jobs. This could help them determine how to offer the best possible customer service and recommend services to certain customers that might appeal more specifically to them.
With the ability to see all of your revenue sources, you can determine how each department, employee, or other elements are performing. Using BuildOps, you can track revenue by a number of categories including job type, property, technician, and department.
Through revenue tracking, you can identify the most profitable customers, seeing as you can also report on budgets and actuals in addition to revenue. You’ll also be able to pinpoint the most profitable technicians based on who is most efficacious, and you can identify the most profitable jobs, job types, projects, and departments. As contractors gain more insight into the most and least profitable revenue streams, they can more effectively pinpoint specific inefficiencies and work to further boost profits. For instance, an HVAC contractor may find that a certain installation service is more frequently in demand among customers, which could influence their marketing as they more actively advertise this service.
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You’ll want to decrease the amount of time spent in several key areas, but you can’t improve that without knowing where you stand and where your bottlenecks are. With more insight into the amount of time you’re spending on certain tasks, you can take steps to optimize efficiency and redirect energy to more important areas.
BuildOps reporting allows users to track time to dispatch, time to complete jobs, time worked per employee, and time to quote. For instance, an electrical contractor may identify dispatch times that take too long as well as inefficient times worked per technician. With these insights, the contractor would be able to figure out ways to shorten dispatch times and engage in workforce capacity planning to optimize work hours for each employee. Office staff could also use BuildOps to schedule for a single technician or implement group scheduling for teams.
With reliable maintenance reporting, companies can keep track of all assets to determine when maintenance is needed for each property and piece of equipment. In some cases, you may want to see all of a customer’s assets for all of their properties, while in others you may only want to see assets that belong to one of a customer’s properties. This is why BuildOps enables you to view assets by property and/or customer. In addition, you can view assets by type and service history. All of this gives you total transparency into customers’ equipment to optimize the efficiency of maintenance services.
Users can also track preventive maintenance agreements, with the ability to filter by job status. If any jobs are currently incomplete, you can instantly locate any customers that are overdue for a preventive maintenance visit.
Using a reliable reporting system, commercial contractors can collect and understand the data they need to optimize their operational efficacy. With in-depth insights into quotes, events, revenue, time, and maintenance, contractors can effectively identify bottlenecks and other issues. From there, they can take the necessary steps to eliminate those issues and get the most from their operations.
If you would like to learn more about how our all-in-one platform can improve reporting and assist with other aspects of management, schedule a demo today.
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