Hosted by Mark Bradley
In our last article, we discussed how using time tracking apps such as LMN Time can save you countless hours of administrative work, increase communication between the field and office and lead to missing less billable events.
Today we’re going to look at how time tracking apps can help you manage your field staff. A lot of time tracking apps can also track your employees’ locations and things like how long you spend on unbillable tasks while also letting staff know exactly what they need for a job. The result? A more productive crew, you save money with up to the minute time punches and with GPS you can hold your crews accountable for being on site, and even provide this information to clients to avoid any liability issues.
Help your crews become more productive.
Crews become more productive when they know exactly what’s expected of them, have the necessary instructions to do the work properly and know how long they should be spending on a job. At any time, your crews can check their phone and see how much time you estimate their visit should take, and how long they’ve spent. Being able to see that information can even improve morale believe it or not! People want to feel like they’re doing a good job, so by being able to see they completed a job/task on time or under-time, it feels good! On the flip side, in the office, you get confirmation your crews are where they should be, and can prove it with GPS stamps if need be to avoid any liability issues that could come up even years later.
One of the major advantages though is being able to differentiate the time you’re spending on unbillable tasks like prep work and driving to and from a jobsite from actual productive hours spent on a job. Tracking these separately lets you see exactly how long your crews should be spending, on average, driving to and from each jobsite. It also helps your estimates become even more accurate in the future because you’ll have a lot of actual historical data to use as reference, making your bids that much more competitive.
Know your numbers!
Knowing what you’re spending on unproductive labor can also be a real eye opener. It’s great being able to dig deeper into your numbers and see why one crew might have more unproductive time than others or if you need to charge more for clients that are further away, for example. It can also lead to becoming more efficient if you’re noticing certain job routes are unproductive. Having the information to tell you the route should be changed can save you a lot of money over a years’ time!
Now you might be thinking that you have vehicle GPS so you don’t need time tracking apps because you can see already the truck is at the job. While it’s true there are some great vehicle tracking software’s that will even track vehicle maintenance for you, as far as crews go they will only tell you they were there, and not what was done. This is where apps like LMN Time come in handy (and often used with vehicle GPS) because they let you know exactly how long your crews spent on each individual task at a job.
We will discuss how this can improve your job costing and estimating in Part 3 of how time tracking apps can benefit your business!
