Inline Construction use LiveCosts to:
- Save 75% of their time spent tracking costs
- Keep control of their costs across their projects
- Exponentially grow their business
About Inline Construction
Inline Construction specialises in high-end residential and commercial construction projects – from new builds and deep retrofits to all types of housing developments.
Learn more at www.inlineconstruction.ie
Challenges
What Problems Were You Trying To Solve?
I was finishing up a job after working on it for six months and not knowing, really, how you’ve come out percentage-wise, how your profits are on the job, what parts of the job that you made your mark on profit-wise, and what parts you lost on.
So you can take it into the next job to kind of try and rectify it.
What Problems Were These Causing From A Business Perspective?
Because you might have three or four jobs going on at any one time, if you don’t have a proper tracking software, you don’t know what job is doing well. You might think you know, but you don’t actually know what job you’re making your percentage off, and what job you’re not.
And that all gets into one big pile. The jobs just blend into each other. And you don’t know which is which, and it’s dangerous. Because with construction you don’t really know six months down the road how well you’re doing or how bad you’re doing until it can be too late.
That’s how it gets tricky for a lot of builders. Because by the time they find out that they haven’t done as well as they thought on a few jobs, there’s people coming knocking on the doors.
Did You Use Spreadsheets To Track Project Costs?
We were using spreadsheets in Excel, but we were still missing invoices. With LiveCosts, when the invoice comes in, it goes straight off the part of the project that it’s related to.
But if you’re trying to do it manually, it’s not accurate. It’s just not accurate.
“If you don’t have a proper tracking software, you don’t know what job is doing well.”
Results
What Is The Main Benefit of LiveCosts?
It’s the live tracking of the certain parts of the job. So if we’re in the substructure stage of the project, we can see how we’re doing, and we know if something’s gone drastically wrong as far as the finances go if we’re over budget. We can kind of see if we’re on schedule, and if we need to be careful.
And it could lead back to making any variations on a project. You might think, “Hold on something’s wrong here. This foundation measures out at 20 metres and we’re after putting in 28 metres”, so you have visibility at every stage.
Which LiveCosts Feature Do You Find Most Beneficial To Your Business?
It’s the invoicing going into straight into the software being assigned off different parts of the project. That’s the main feature we use.
Right now we’ve just been using cost tracking, and the bigger we get and the more we expand we’re getting into more features.
How Much Time Does LiveCosts Save Your Business?
It saves us at least 15 to 20 hours a month, using LiveCosts.
You haven’t got 40 hours a month to put into the manual end of things, so you can’t do it properly. With LiveCosts you have the time to just put it on for an hour, you’re off, and then you’ve a lot of your work done.
You could be save yourself a day a week, because it’s always done in bulk. So we’re going in once every week and we’re cleaning up all the invoices. So it’s only an hour or two every couple of weeks, rather than having to sit down for a day a month or two days a month, or however long it takes, depending on the size of the project.
Advice
What Advice Would You Give A Business Considering LiveCosts?
If you’re serious about your business, and you’re serious about expanding and doing well, you need LiveCosts to track where you are, otherwise you’re never going to find out how well you’re doing.
If you’re overpricing, if you’re underpricing, you’re never going to be able to refine your pricing properly unless you track it properly. With a software like LiveCosts, it’s a game changer for us, especially where we are as a business. We’ve expanded in two years what a lot of businesses will expand in ten, so it’s been a game changer for us.
“If you’re serious about your business, and you’re serious about expanding and doing well, you need LiveCosts to track where you are.”
