Whether your plumbing business has been running for decades, or you’re just starting out and looking to run the most efficient plumbing business possible, construction software can save your company huge amounts of time and money.
Here are the nine most significant ways that plumbing businesses have told us that LiveCosts helps their projects stay profitable.
- Track Labour Costs With A Smartphone App
- Predict Overtime On Your Plumbing Project
- Measure A Plumbing Project’s Costs Before You Even Begin
- Predict Plumbing Overtime Costs
- Detect And Avoid Fraud
- Try The Best Labour Costs Tracking Software
- How To Track Plumbing Invoices And Purchase Orders Using Construction Software
- Track Construction Deliveries Live, From Supplier To Site
Track Labour Costs With A Smartphone App
Ensure accuracy and spend less time doing administrative work, by swapping out tracking labour costs on paper for a mobile app.
iPhone or Android apps like LiveCosts labour costs tracking app allow direct input from staff, so you have a full digital report on hours spent on the project, and their cost.
Construction software that tracks labour costs also allows your plumbing business to generate reports on logged hours on every phase of a project. This allows you to export weekly or monthly reports on your plumbing project’s labour costs.
Predict Overtime On Your Plumbing Project
Fore-warned is fore-armed. One of the biggest margin-killers in any plumbing project is unexpected overtime.
But with labour costs tracking software, the chance that an aspect of a project might incur overtime becomes predictable – and you can adjust your schedule accordingly to mitigate it.
Is a job only 50% complete, but almost all the working hours dedicated to it have been used up? See upcoming overtime risks at a glance and you can reorganise your project schedule to alleviate those unexpected costs.
Measure A Plumbing Project’s Costs Before You Even Begin
With a great project spec in place, you can use labour costs tracking software to predict the labour costs of each aspect of your upcoming plumbing project even before you’ve started.
With a rough idea of hourly rates, you can predict how much your labour and subcontractor fees will cost, and better understand if the project is truly viable at the price you’ve quoted.
Predict Plumbing Overtime Costs
Not just how much time, but how their time is being spent. Has too much time been allocated to one job?
Or has a job been tracked as taking a day longer than it should have – and if so, why?
With construction costs tracking software, overtime becomes predictable. With full clarity on how long every aspect of your project should cost, you’ll be able to see when a project is close to running into overtime. Plumbing labour tracking software gives you, the plumbing contractor, new visibility on where your subcontractor spend is going.
Detect and Avoid Fraud
Have hours been logged when you know a subcontractor wasn’t on site? Or two days logged for a 4-hour job?
While it may or may not be fraud, time tracking construction software surfaces and potentially red flags that you, the plumbing contractor, might like to investigate.
There are so many moving parts in construction projects, and those parts are so time-consuming to keep track of, that it’s easy for costs to get lost in the mix. When everything is tracked, everything is accountable and accounted for.
Try The Best Labour Costs Tracking Software
If your plumbing business is looking for the most efficient way to track contractor labours costs between office and site, LiveCosts is the best costs-tracking app for the construction industry.
How To Track Plumbing Invoices and Purchase Orders Using Construction Software
Most plumbing businesses have one thing in common: they still use a combination of paper and Excel to track their project costs – from materials to labour – and dedicate a huge amount of time every month to reconciling the two.
It doesn’t have to be like this. With construction software, you can digitally track and reconcile construction invoices, purchase orders, track labour costs, and more. And because it’s digital, you can see where any project is at a glance – instantly, and accurately.
Ciaran Devlin from Inline Construction recently told us that it saved him almost a week a month on administrative tasks, and that he was able to use construction costs software to grow his business in two years what he expected would take ten.
So how do you implement construction costs management software into your plumbing business?
Your money makes business by working, not by spending days every month trying to reconcile crumpled invoices with purchase orders inside one of dozens of Excel spreadsheets on your desktop.
Construction costs tracking software frees up those hours spent on administration, and lets your business keep its focus where it belongs: winning business, and generating revenue.
How? By managing your construction financial documents through automation. For example, LiveCosts integration with Sage50 can process invoices into Sage 50x faster than inside Sage alone.
Use Software To Calculate Smarter Bids on Plumbing Projects
When tendering for a plumbing project, your plumbing business can use construction software to make more accurate estimates.
When you can accurately project a potential project’s cost of materials, the number of subcontractor hours, and the cost of those hours, the software will surface any surprises in margin or costs. Construction software can also help to improve your TTE (Time To Estimate), which frees up time for your to research and bid on more plumbing project tenders.
Track Construction Deliveries Live, From Supplier To Site
With software like LiveCosts, every delivery of construction materials is logged the minute it arrives on site.
This lets you see that the right quantity of the correct construction material was delivered, meaning you can see immediately if not enough was delivered, or if the wrong product was delivered.
Because you can take action instantly, you can react to correct this delivery error without much delay, saving you time.
