It has been said that ‘anyone can be a busy fool’. Installers know this phrase all too well. You set off on the journey from winning the sale, knowing that you have a profitable job on your hands, only to find out at the end that you barely broke even.
Business Pilot has a heap of resources to help you avoid this. From MI Reports, to exporting endless data should you want to analyse it that much. However, the simplest way is to use some of the margin control features that are there to help you come out of every job having made a profit. Its why we added margin control features to our Why We Love list.
Of course, the first place you could be losing margin is in the product itself. That’s why we leave pricing tools to the professionals and we use APIs (links between the systems) to make sure you can use the most accurate pricing tools, with the best business management tool.
Then of course, there are the other areas that can be overlooked like whether a property has difficult access or extra plant/scaffold requirements. This is where a mix of the Google Earth (satellite imagery, street view imagery) comes in and the site photos being held inside the lead and contract. This means at the sales management stage and the convert to contract stage; you have all the information you need to make sure any extra challenges are factored in well before you commit to taking on the work.
So far, we are making sure the job itself is lined up to hit your desired margin. Then it is down to ordering and with price increases like we have seen recently, this is always tricky. Therefore, we need to make sure the purchase order values match what we expected and later in the process, the invoices match the purchase orders. That’s why we include this at the convert to contract stage.
The other way you can lose margin on a job is when the job takes longer than anticipated. When you set up a contract in Business Pilot, you budget for the fit time required. This drives how many days/half days are available to put onto the schedule board. Whilst you can always add more, you will see immediately the impact on your margin.
As you can see, because everything about the sale and the subsequent contract is connected, as soon as you add more job costs, install days, changes in purchase order values etc. they all flag up to help you minimise margin erosion.
A great example of that is how you can set a tolerance for how much an invoice amount can deviate from the value on the purchase order. If the tolerance is exceeded, the invoice will need sign off.
You simply can’t get all the way to the end of the job and find that you haven’t made the money you had hoped. Business Pilot’s margin control features are sitting alongside you every step of the way, like an additional member of the team that has one job and that is to keep you profitable.
How do you currently do this for each of your jobs? Are you spending a lot of time looking through contracts to see how costs are affecting your profit, or are they always at your fingertips? One click? What would it mean to your business if you had Business Pilot permanently monitoring margin erosion for you to make sure jobs remain profitable? What would that mean to you personally? We think it would mean a lot and therefore we voted for the margin control features in Business Pilot to be added to our Why We Love list.
