9 Daily Tasks Made Easier with Homebuilding Software

How a Construction Project Management App Simplifies Your Day

Home builders and remodelers who use construction project management software deal with the same daily tasks and challenges as those who don’t, they just do it faster and more efficiently.

If you have a phone in your pocket or a tablet on the job site, but you don’t have residential project management software, you’re letting your most powerful time-saving asset collect dust.

Here are nine daily tasks that are made easier with home building software:

1. Retrieving data

If your data is all over the place (email, spreadsheets, notebook, the back of a napkin, your brain) just think of how much mental energy you’re spending each day to keeping it all straight. The goal of project management software for builders is to save time and energy by centralizing and organizing everything within one app. Accounting features including budgeting, billing, invoicing, and cash flow reporting are at hand. The same goes with bid management, scheduling, change orders, purchase orders, service requests, and more.

Instant access to information enables executives, sales reps, project managers, trades, and everyone else involved in the project to collaborate efficiently, get updates automatically, and get answers to questions without delay.

With real-time data, you can also provide accurate job costing. Your system includes standard set rates for your company’s services, with cost details that apply to each supervisor, production manager, and crew member. Job costing functions include managing schedules, generating purchase orders, creating invoices, and tracking expenses.

2. Managing projects, crew, and subs

Assigning tasks to your crew and subs during each stage of construction can be an incredibly time-consuming process, especially when you don’t have technology at your disposal. Project managers often struggle to keep track of schedules, dispatch work orders, assign tasks, adjust for new client requests, manage subs, and keep projects moving forward. Forget about managing multiple projects at the same time. Homebuilding software helps you manage all these tasks, so nothing falls through the cracks.

3. Communication and mobility

Builders often see half their day slip away while they’re busy on the phone or sending emails and texts. With home building software, not only are your team, subcontractors, and clients all using the same system to communicate and move projects forward, but the software itself eliminates the need for most of your messages in the first place with things like shared task lists and automated progress reports. This eliminates redundant work, including multiple phone calls and emails to alert contributors with job status updates. Best of all, everyone’s can manage communications from any internet-connected device, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

4. Delegation and accountability

Construction project management software gives your team the peace of mind to ensure everything is getting done, even the little things that can be easily missed. As they say, “the devil is in the details” and nothing is truer for custom home builders and remodelers. Task lists are synchronized with the project schedule and developed into templates, creating action items for each project that can be recreated with a single click. Once a task is assigned via the app, you can check progress by looking at your phone rather than having to play phone tag to find out what you have to do and by when. You can even automate reminders to keep the task front-of-mind until it’s completed.

5. Budgets and schedules

Aside from the convenience of storing all of your data in one place, the real magic happens when all of that data is interconnected. When you enter a change order, for instance, the system will roll over all of the variables for you: your schedule will update, your budget forecast will take the new change into account, and notifications will be sent out to everyone affected.

6. Keeping clients informed and happy

Since your reputation relies on great client relations, a well-designed construction app gives your clients enough access to keep them happy and up to date without the need for frequent meetings. Your clients get their own login credentials to browse updated data (only the data that you’ve chosen to give them access to) and project photos at any time. You can keep making progress while they check in on their own time.

7. Document and photo management

Construction apps centrally house all of the photos and files for your project and eliminate the work and expense of maintaining an antiquated filing system. But even with a paperless office, too many builders and project managers fumble around with sharing access to different systems like Dropbox, Drive, and email attachments. When it’s all in one place, documenting any piece of project information is quick, easy, and secure. You can store photos and documents indefinitely, with far greater storage capacity than any filing cabinet, and move on knowing that it is stored along with all the project data for quick access.

8. Progress reporting

Putting custom reports together can be a time-consuming process. You shouldn’t have to jump from Excel to your notebook to your email to a phone call just to gather the data you knew you would need at some point anyway. When using an app like BuildTools, you can set up report templates that automatically pull the right data, so when it comes time to send updates you just need to review, add your own notes if needed, and click send.

9. Change orders

Nobody likes a change order, but they are inevitable. They don’t have to be a headache, though. If your phone is in your pocket or your tablet is nearby, you are ready to take a change order in stride and move on. Construction project management software allows you to document the specifics of a change order, get the client’s signature on the change, send automatic updates to your team and subcontractors, update your schedule, and update your budget, all within the app.

What’s the next step?

Schedule a time for a walk-through of our software and get your questions answered one-on-one. We can help you determine if project management software is right for your company. Click below to find a time that works for you.

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