Friday evening, with the site reports on the counter
One came as a photo of a sheet of squared paper, one is a message typed from the van, one is the sheet folded in four that the foreman pulls out of his pocket, and the hours are there but the job isn't written down anywhere
Meanwhile the supplier delivery notes (DDT) pile up, the one from the hardware supplier, the one for the electrical material delivered straight to the site, and each has its own format, its own way of writing the quantities, and its own fine illegible signature at the bottom
Twenty on site, one and a half in the office
A firm with twenty people on site often has an office of one and a half, who does the quotes, the invoices, the suppliers, the documents to keep in order for inspections, and answers the phone while doing them
The work comes in waves, when the sites are pushing the office drowns, and when the office drowns the first thing to go is exactly the posting of costs, because it looks like the least urgent, the documents are there and sooner or later they'll get sorted
Examples of what the system can do in an office like that
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some firm, we started recently and we'd rather say so straight away
- The system gathers the site reports from wherever they arrive, the mailbox, the shared folder, the photos sent by message, reads the date, the crew, the hours and the site, and prepares the lines to enter
- It takes the supplier delivery notes, pulls out supplier, date, material and quantity, and matches them to the order or to the job following the rules you give it, by site, by supplier, by material code, or however you have decided to keep them
- It opens the business software you use and enters the lines, whether that's the accounting one or a trade program like ACCA PriMus, STR Vision or the Namirial software, without you having to change program
- It renames and files the documents in the job's folder, with the naming you already use, so when an inspection turns up the document is there without anyone hunting for it
- It compares the hours on the site reports with the hours recorded and sets the differences aside, instead of leaving them to surface when the work is over
If the program you use has no direct integration to the outside that's fine too, the system opens it on the screen and works inside it the way a person would, and it's the house specialty, you'll find it explained in programs with no integrations and in business software automation
What you go on doing yourself
The decisions stay where they are now, which job stacks up and which doesn't, what to bill on, how to handle a supplier, when to pull a crew off, that's the trade you get paid for and no system touches it
When a site report doesn't say which site it's for, or a delivery note matches nothing, the system doesn't guess, it stops and leaves you the case to look at, so what reaches your desk is only the real exception
Why it's worth it for a firm like yours
The hours that go into data entry today come back, and they're worth most in the weeks when the wave hits, when they're the only ones you don't have, without hiring another person in the office to type in data somebody has already written once
The bigger gain, though, is timing, if the costs go in while the job is still open, you read the numbers while you can still do something about them, instead of reading them when the work is finished and all that's left is to take note
You can put your own firm's numbers into the calculation page and see what manual work costs you today
Who's on the other end
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, P IVA 04650850243, and I work out of Nove, in the province of Vicenza, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you talk straight to the person who does the work
You show me a procedure, a screen recording on its own is fine, I tell you whether it can be done and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, we agree that figure in writing and you approve every addition yourself, if you'd rather talk it over you'll find everything on the contact page
The names of the programs mentioned on this page are trademarks of their respective owners, we name them only so you can tell what kind of programs we mean, we have no relationship with the companies that make them and we don't sell their licenses