5 ways to use tech in your construction business to save time and money

When you’re running a construction business, there are always more jobs to do than there are hours in the day. Luckily there are a bunch of tech tools to help you out.

There’s not a tradie alive who would rather do a whole bunch of paperwork instead of being on the tools.

But with the right combination of tech, you can make all the boring stuff a breeze so you can get back to what you do best.

1. Keep track of jobs

Got five jobs on for the day in different parts of town?

It can be hard to keep track of everything going on, especially if certain jobs start taking longer than you think.

Luckily, there are a raft of tools such as Tradify available to help you keep track of jobs on the go – adding notes to jobs so all operators can know what’s going on by simply looking at their phone.

Sure as hell beats trying to organise your staff by making phone call after phone call.

2. Chasing invoices

There’s nothing worse than taking time out of your day to chase up payment on that job you did a month ago.

While smart invoicing solutions can help get your customers paying you sooner, chasing up those who are late can be a hassle you just don’t need.

Luckily, there are solutions like ezyCollect on hand to take the hassle out of chasing for you.

You can create ‘rules’ which sort out what sort of follow-up is done after a month of non-payment, 45 days, and so on.

If you have a customer who owes you on multiple jobs, the program also allows them to pay them all at once instead of having to pay multiple times – meaning a happier customer and you getting paid quicker.

3. Payroll and rostering

Some software programs automatically handle payroll too.

For instance, check out MYOB’s range of intuitive products, which cater to businesses of all sizes. Time spent on recurring HR tasks will soon become a thing of the past.

What’s more, there are also a range of add-on options available built from the ground up specifically for the trade and construction industry.

Once you’ve set up employees in a system, payroll software is perfect for automatically paying employees, and tracking and calculating leave entitlements.

It will also email payslips to workers, and provide you with access to real-time timesheets.

4. Accounting

When you’re on the job dealing with faulty wiring while your phone’s ringing hot, the last thing you’re thinking about doing your BAS.

It often gets left for a bit of quiet time after hours (if you don’t have any emergency jobs on), and then who wants to spend hours in the books?

With the right accountant, bookkeeper, and software you won’t need to spend hours doing the thing you love the least.

Accounting software like the MYOB suite uses bank feeds – which automatically puts in bank transactions into your software.

From there, you or your advisor can set up ‘rules’ to get the software to recognise transactions you make all the time (such as paying for petrol) so you don’t have to put that in constantly.

5. Social media

The days of looking up a plumber in the Yellow Pages is over.

These days it’s all about social media, but it’s not enough to just have an account and leave it at that.

Instead, you need to be publishing regularly.

It can be really hard to keep on top of social media, and one of the things people do is schedule multiple posts on multiple platforms when they do have a moment of time — and you can do this using tools like Hootsuite.

Any social media program worth its salt will also let you analyse the results of your various social media posts.

Use these to determine which content works best for your business, then tailor future posts accordingly.

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