How a Builders Estimating System can assist your company

Your company is probably the result of many years of hard graft, not just in terms of your own personal construction efforts but collectively over the years of honing your skills and perfecting your particular trade, coming up with the finances to start up your company and then finding the right people to work within it and pass along your knowledge and skills of the trade to the next generation of tradesmen and contractors. At least that is how it used to be, these days there are courses for everything, including the one personally handed down trades like carpentry and stonemasonry can now be learned in the confines of a technical college and things can arguably change for the worse. On the other hand, they can also make the job of tradesmen a little bit easier with advances in technology being applied to your field of work.

That’s where the newest, bleeding edge of the construction industry comes into the fray with a new offering for what is perceived as a physical rather than logical field of work and that is construction estimation and management software. These excellent programs make some of the fiddler or complicated parts of the process just that little bit more streamlined and automated. Many once die-hard traditional builders and tradies have now been turned around by virtue of just how many important features that many of them offer and how easy it is to perform the once most annoying jobs of the day – paperwork. But what are the main reasons that people are swayed into investing in a computer program to help them build? Shouldn’t they be able to do it themselves? Well while that is probably not the case, let’s explore some of the reasons why more and more contractors are digitizing some of their processes to fit the modern world.

Real time accounting and cost projection

One of the main parts of the jobs that most contractors will say to people who ask is firstly the amount of paperwork generated by the orders and quotations and records and receipts that are handed to them left right and center for different things depending on what the job is. Well with a lot of newer building management programs, that is eliminated allowing you to digitize your ledger making it easy to input your own values and data and have it calculated not just for your but for everyone in your company to show you, at an easy glance, how under or over budget you are for any particular kind of job that you are trying to keep track of.

This makes it easy to see where exactly your company is being efficient and on what jobs you are squandering either company or client money on whatever is making the project over budget and is easy to read not just from an accounting standpoint but also from your own. Why pay for a full time accountant when you could just as easily have a monthly bookkeeper who costs far less and just has to officially register the incoming and outgoing expenditure of your company and its source. Meaning you have to have far less lengthy conversations regarding the individual finances of each project.

Quotation and Estimation

These are more often than not another part of the job that most builders and tradesmen don’t exactly relish and that is to visit a customer in order to evaluate exactly how much their job will cost both in raw material terms and in their own company’s costing terms. Most of the time it has previously been done by eye and general estimation, however this leaves you open to human error and miscalculation on the part of the person who is giving the quote, meaning you could potential overlook an important and costly part of the work or even that you fail to quote for the necessary materials.

Well this can be avoided as nowadays you can find many estimation and quotation feature included in the additional features of many different building management programs and it has never been easier to not only quote the job but also to help calculate the materials you will need and use the internet to cross reference with local suppliers giving you the added advantage of being able to deliver accurate and realistic quotes to your customers with a fraction of the work. Please click the following link for more information about the additional benefits of using a builders estimating system.