That’s the question operations manager Rick Jones and the team at Malady Electrical wanted to answer.
That’s the question operations manager Rick Jones and the team at Malady Electrical wanted to answer when they started searching for a better way to keep on top of their jobs and the company’s performance.
The team at Malady took on every sort of job from residential call-outs to million-dollar electrical projects. They were booked and busy, but wanted to help with 3 areas of the business:
With the Fergus app on their phones, each team member is now able to log their start and end time against each job – plus they can log the materials used against the job immediately. The accuracy of invoicing has improved because the team are recording information instantly.
“I'd hate to think of how many invoices got blown away in the wind onsite and were never ever billed out to the customer.”
Everything entered on the app gets added to the job automatically, allowing the office team to invoice faster and more accurately.
Integrations with suppliers, like Middy’s, give the team access to up to date pricebooks and means materials can be added automatically to the job when the job number is quoted when ordering. The risk of undercharging for materials and losing money is now gone, the integration gives the team instant insight into the cost and profit to be made.
“We know now that there is not one cent that get spent that we do not allocate to a job. I'm terrified to think how much money that we never did invoice out to our customers.”
Materials are no longer forgotten now that the gaps between ordering materials for a job and invoicing are closed.
Once the team was up and running using Fergus to quote, schedule and invoice, it was time to understand more about the profit margins of each job type.
Understanding the profit margins of each job type was key to help the company focus in a particular direction. To do this, the team needed oversight of the details of each job – labour hours, charge out rate, invoiced hours, material cost and invoiced materials.
Fergus uses this information to produce reporting on the business health each month.
Straight away, Rick could see the total profit made on each and every job, and use this insight to give his team a better idea of the jobs to chase and the jobs to turn down.
“We could immediately identify areas where our margins were great and not so great. We could tell that at a glance in Fergus."
It's more important than ever to keep on top of your processes and make your business as profitable as possible.
Job management software helps business owners to streamline the admin involved in running a business. Cutting down on the amount of time spent doing paperwork and increasing the control you have on the performance of your business.
Get started for free with a 14 day trial of Fergus - no credit card required.