You can grow a trade business without one, of course, you can, but they bring significant advantages:

• There’s less paper to shuffle or fewer separate systems to enter stuff into (so mistakes are fewer and we know mistakes cost money).
• They make quoting and invoicing easier and they integrate straight with Xero or MYOB or Quickbooks so you spend less time on that.
• They make scheduling easier and less fidelity (and time-consuming).
• They make it easy to measure your profitability on jobs (which you should be doing).

They sound great, don’t they? 

So what’s the catch?

Well, like most things, they cost money, so there’s that, and like most technology, there’s a bit to learn before you get the benefits.

Let me explain what they do quickly.

The Old Way

In the old days, you did your estimates in Excel or on a quoting software and then attached it to an email and sent it over for review.

Acceptance was by email or paper contracts and version control was a problem (which means it was easy for people to accept the wrong one, right?)

Variations were done by email and accepted by email and were difficult to track. 

Scheduling was done in your calendar app(s) and pushed out to your team in their calendar.

You ordered stuff from your supplier on their website or by email or phone or in-person at their shop and dealt with invoices on emails or paper.

And you raised invoices in Xero or whatever accounting system you used.

Reconciling costs to jobs was a manual process.

Reconciling timesheets to jobs was a manual process (only done if you were charging cost plus, right?).

Role of Job Management System

So what a job management system does is link all those systems together. 

• You can still do your quote in Excel or another system and import it in or you can quote from within the job management system (or your people can); 
• It can be emailed from the system (kind of attached to the job) and your customer’s acceptance is attached to the job; 
• Variations occur within it and are easy to track, invoices are raised from within it and sent to Xero; 
• Materials are ordered, similarly: and 
• Your team log their time on jobs from their phones so you can assign time to jobs and measure your profit on every job.

You should get one. I’m a huge fan.

There are lots to choose from and I can help you.

I wrote an article comparing the main players but there are more out every day.
Comment ‘Article’ and we’ll send it to you.