You most likely encounter many challenges on a day-to-day basis. One of these challenges is the issue of time management. Running a successful electrical contracting business requires efficient and effective planning of schedules, quotes, invoices, customer jobs and more. This can take up a large chunk of your day-to-day operations, taking up both time and resources.
If you’re an electrician, investing in the right job management software allows you to focus on what you need. With Fergus's job management software, you can automate those manual, admin-heavy tasks while improving productivity and efficiency.
Here, we explain some of the top reasons why using a job management software solution is essential for electricians:
Whether it’s your clients, administration team, apprentices or suppliers, communication is essential to maintaining a successful and profitable business. Electricians/business owners can use job management software to keep all inquiries and job information in one central place, this allows for quick and efficient communication on the go between all key stakeholders.
From adding client details to monitoring the ordering of materials between sites, you can communicate effectively with your team and suppliers no matter where you are. With Fergus, managing and mobilising your team is easy. When it comes to coordinating your team and sending contractors out to a job, you can give them all the information they need in advance, reducing downtime between jobs.
For electricians, time is money. Too often, scheduling conflicts occur - especially trying to juggle too many jobs at once, individual calendars can be hard to keep track of with business owners struggling to lack visibility across each team member's movements throughout the day. Add to this understanding which parts are in stock, on backorder or with the supplier, and you have yourself quite the headache.
By using a centralised scheduling system, you can take complete control of your schedule by assigning tasks to team members or clients, matching calendars with individual projects, viewing the progress of a timeline in real-time, and breaking big jobs down into separate tasks.
Fergus's job management software goes one further by integrating a scheduling & GPS tracking feature that allows you to instantly book jobs based on your team's locations and check in on job progress throughout the day. Get it out of your head and into Fergus.
A job management system allows you to see your business as a whole. At a glance, you can see where all the revenue in your business is and stay on top of job performance and progress to make sure you're on track to make a solid profit. Through an easy-to-navigate dashboard, you can access all key insights into your business allowing you to make smarter business decisions. For example, you have the ability to look at the profit per job and assess whether you or your team have been underquoting hours and missing out on revenue. It’s common for electricians to have multiple jobs at the same time, all varying in job length and resources. From remembering who did what to keeping track of contact hours spent, it’s easy to become overwhelmed while managing your business.
One of the biggest challenges and frustrations for electricians is invoicing and chasing up payments. Reminding customers to pay you on time is never pleasant and can make both you and your client feel uncomfortable. One of the best features of a job management system for electricians is the ability to use the in-built automated payment reminders. Fergus leads the way in making invoicing easier for electricians.
Through the Fergus platform, you can easily build invoices from a template or build one from scratch as well as move jobs from 'In Progress' to 'Back Costing' while you wait on final costs before you invoice. A job management system also makes it easier to provide quick quotes & estimates. As an electrician, you have to find the cost for materials before sending out your quote to a client. The Fergus app has a live pricing feature that ensures you’re quoting the right price and getting the best deals from your suppliers.
As an owner of an electrical business, it’s crucial to safeguard your business and team against workplace dangers. Maintaining OH&S and safety compliance documents along with your electrical certificates is a required aspect of your job. Since you are required by law to store these documents for a five-year period before having to renew again, this amounts to a lot of paperwork. In addition to having to store these documents, you also need to be able to access them at all times. With job management software, you can store and access all of your important documents and certificates in one spot and be able to access them wherever, whenever. You also have the option to send these documents directly to clients electronically.
Data entry makes up a big part of an electrician's day. For a lot of businesses, all quotes, invoices and job cards are paper-based - leaving a trail of paperwork that makes it hard to keep track of all jobs. Filling out job cards isn’t just a hassle, it also makes it hard to follow. With job management software, all those intricacies are streamlined. The amount of physical paper lying around is halved or even eliminated, freeing you from paperwork and reducing human-based error. Fergus understands you didn’t start a trade business just to be bogged down in paperwork. One of our stand-out features includes Digital Job Cards that lets you create job cards easily with existing or new customers.
The list of benefits of using job management software for electricians and electrical contractors is numerous. The most stand-out advantage is the fact that it saves you time and money. In an industry that is always in demand and which requires a stack of resources to juggle multiple jobs and clients, a central job management system will make a real difference in the overall flow and efficiency of your business.
There are numerous job management systems on the market today. However, when you need a system that is built for electricians, then Fergus should be your first choice.
Start a free trial with Fergus or find out more about how our job management software helps electricians.