Many contractors are taking a look at their internal operations and making smart use of technology. Starting with the goal of driving down costs and getting paid for everything you do, there are three steps you can use to get the greatest return for your effort:

1) Assess your “Call to Cash” process.
Sit down with your dispatcher, lead tech and biller, and talk through each step from when a call comes in or a bid is won. Draw it out if you can. You should be able to describe why you do each step and the reasons you might have to break from your standard process.

2) Document your opportunities for improvement.
Once you have a clear picture of how things are working, look for places you can make it easier and eliminate needless waste. For example:
• Are you writing down or keying in the same information on multiple pieces of paper and various systems?
• Are all the parts on a job being accounted for on your invoices?
• Are you needlessly writing off invoices because you can’t justify how long you were at a customer site?
• Are you minimizing drive time for your techs?
• Are you billing for all your techs’ job time?
• Are you hurting your customer relationships by repeatedly rescheduling service calls?
• Are you wasting valuable office time chasing down and verifying paperwork?

3) Evaluate current and potential technology to capitalize on your opportunities.
Look at how well you are using the systems you have in-house.
• Many contractors only use a portion of the functionality available in their accounting and business software systems. Talk to other folks using the same systems you have. Many times they can give you tips that will save you time. Community forums are a great place to do this, and they are free.
• Take a look at your set-up. You may find you have tons of old data in your system that slows you down or makes invoicing prone to error.

Look at adding new systems or replacing old ones that are not working very well.
• If you have more than one system in-house, is the information moving seamlessly between them? Many modern systems can be integrated to save time and reduce errors from double entry.
• Could you provide better customer service and save money using a dispatch system with GPS/mapping and scheduling built-in? There are very good solutions available for this.
• Could you make office and techs more efficient with a mobile solution? Mobile applications used to be just for guys like FedEx and UPS, but now you can get mobile phones and PDAs capable of capturing timecard information, processing work orders, and accepting payments on-site.

Once you have a handle on how you are really running things, making them run better is just a matter of deciding what you want to do differently and getting your employees to adopt the new process.