Dan Pollard
Transcript:
Hey, guys. Thanks for joining me today. My name is Dylan. And today we're looking at how to decrease the amount of time you spend on Edmond by 75% or another way to look at it. We want to decrease the amount of non billable hours you do per job. Here at Fergus, we'd say that if you're spending longer than 10 minutes caring for a job that you do often, then you're systems are failing you and your expenses can be drastically reduced. Some of our users say that they now spend up to a quarter of their time doing office Edmond that they used to, which is pretty cool. So today I'll take you through a quick demo of Fergus looking at creating a job from start to finish.
We'll focus on tools that will speed up your job management processes. Firstly, let's look at the Standards Board. The Standards Board is unique to Fergus, and this is where you can see at a glance how your jobs are progressing. You can see whether you've received payment for every job. The status board works on a traffic light system. Green is on track. Yellow may require some attention and needs to be looked at. Fergus moves the jobs through the status board based on what you're inputting on the job card itself. So the movement is automated. The main benefit here is that office managers don't have to waste time flipping through your books and looking at which job needs attention. Instead, Fergus prioritizes everything for you so that you can focus on bottlenecks in your business. Let's get started and create a job.
Once you click on New job, you'll be taken to the customer screen. Here we can select a customer from the existing database in Fergus or create a new customer. I'll show you the steps for creating a new customer now so the customer can be the company name or just a client who has requested the job. You will have a default main contact for the customer and you can add as many contact methods for this person as you type. A new option will appear below for you to continue. Remember, these details will be same for the next time you do a job for the same customer. From here, we need to specify what type of job you are carrying out. We can choose from charge, up, estimate or quote to give you the full experience. Leaves make a quote into the job title and a description. The description is what the team in the field will see on the mobile app, so being descriptive here will help give a clear indication of what needs to be done. But you can go back and edit this at a later stage if you need to. Let's create the job.
And we've created a job. Getting to this point will take on average two minutes. The best part is all the information you have entered now will automatically fade into job cards, site visits, invoices, and much more. Saving you more time as the job progresses. Now that the job has been created, I'll run through what we have here at the top of the page. Firstly, we can see the job prefix and Fergus has assigned a job number. You can set what job number you'd like Fergus to start at. So as to avoid any double UPS. If you're using an accounting package with Fergus also, we can see here our job title and a status next to it. For now, the job is in the two price tag. Below this, we can create variations, view the customer details and contact them via SMS or email. We can also jump into the map and see what address we're working in. At any stage, we can change the type of job we're creating so you aren't locked into making a quote if anything changes? Great if you need to change the job. Back to an estimate. All the information is there so you won't need to start from scratch.
Next to this we have the ellipsis, which gives us the option to make this a recurring job. Seeing the job details and tasks specific to this job archive the job put the job on hold or again create a variation lets into some details into the quote. Now you can intersections to split out your materials from your labor. Fergus also allows you to create favorites for anything you want to use regularly, allowing you to have all the parts for a piece of work pull in from the click of a button. What you will notice is that you have the option to add these as a combined line item. This will hide all the individual parts from the customer and simply display them as a home. In this case, what a cylinder. When we add a combined line item, you'll be able to see all the materials.
But if we select preview, we can see what the customer sees. You will notice as you update the cost and sell prices. Fergus is calculating your margin from this. You can also see the markup for the materials from the options at the top of the quote. If you need to or apply discounts. Favourites and Mark UPS are particularly useful for speeding up quoting as you can essentially add sets of materials for jobs you do often and spit out a quote in a matter of seconds. In some cases with small jobs, you can even give a rough quote while you've got the customer on the phone. Once you're happy with the quote, you can hit Publish and Fergus will ask you if you'd like to email or print this document. Let's email it so we can see the template. The templates can be as generic as you like and we'll give the customer a link to accept or decline this quote. I'll just manually accept this now, which automatically feeds back to Fergus to update where it sits on the status board to move it to the scheduling column. Now that the quote has been accepted, Fergus has created a site visit for the job.
Site visits attract through litters so we can see site visit. And within the site visit we have several tabs. We can enter details. So the scheduling tab is where we can assign employees or groups to the job. This takes you through to the calendar in focus where we can drag and drop the job into a time or day slot for an employee. Once the job is in the calendar, we can select it to bring a pop up to make further adjustments if need be. Once confirmed, the employee received a notification that the job has been assigned to them straight away on the first mobile app. Labor is where your team can input charged or uncharged time entries. If they have been using the mobile app on site, entries will appear here.
The advantage of using the mobile app is the team can run a timer to record exactly how many hours they spend on site, so you don't have to follow up. Everyone for timesheets at the end of the week. Once input we can see a summary of the hours entered and any breaks et cetera that were recorded as well as the total charge out for this employee. If we return to the home screen, we can check where our job is on the status board. And now it's moved from scheduling to in progress and then after a time entry into the back crossings column. This is the only section that requires manual input to move it to the next column.
The only reason for this is because Fergus wants to double check. You've input all your costs before you invoice out. Let's create an invoice. It's simple to add the costs. We just tick anything applicable, and Fergus calculates the total dollar value to add to the invoice. And we can add this in. The invoice builder is very similar to the quote builder. The difference here is that we can use the approval process if your team needs someone to review the invoice or else choose whether you want to just approve, approve an email or approve and print. If we select Approve an email, we can see the body of our email as well as the option to attach files and photos to the email directly from the job. If you wanted to pass these on to the customer once you have emailed this, Fergus will ask you if the job is complete. To make the last move to the payments column of the status board. This is also the point at which Fergus will pass these details onto your accounting system.
So no need for double handling. We do have a feature called Fergus pay. You can enable, which allows you to take credit card payments directly and can help speed up cash flow. Ask us for more details on this. Once you've created your first couple of jobs, getting to the stage should take around five minutes for a standard job. Think of it this way. The amount of time out users St with Fergus easily outweighs the costs in some cases by 10 to 1. So as you can see, it pays for itself. We're also running a limited time deal just for you.
If you sign up for a trial and enter your billing details in the next 24 hours with the promo code Vegas of 25, you'll get 25% off your first two months of Fergus after the free trial month. Thanks for tuning in, guys. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot them through to support@fergus.com.
