One of the biggest challenges in business is gaining accurate information from field staff. The nature of their work means that there is a delay between when they gather information and when it is returned to the office for processing.
Let me give you some examples…
You have engineers working on job sites. They perform minor works and record their time and materials on job cards or time sheets that you don’t see until the end of the day or even the end of the week. The result is that materials ordering and invoicing is delayed until the information is recorded back in the office.
If you have a number of field staff who return their job sheets at the end of the week, it takes days before that data is processed. So if a job is completed on Monday, it may be the following Monday before the client invoice is raised and posted.
Let’s say you have ten field staff, each doing 20 jobs worth £100 each per week, you aren’t billing their collective £20,000 until the following week. If those accounts are each paid in 14 days, your cash flow is three weeks in arrears of the job. If you are ordering replacement stock from the job sheets, your stock levels are in effect double what they could be as you’re keeping two weeks additional stock as a buffer.
Imagine you were able to invoice the job the day it was completed. That means your receivables cycle is reduced by as much as 14 days. If you were able to reorder stock on a daily basis, your stock levels would be reduced.
Coupled together, the net impact on cash flow and available working capital is vastly improved. In addition, payroll information is accurate on a weekly basis instead of being weekly in arrears and saves you the pain of chasing times each week.
Does this sound attractive?
Here’s how this can be achieved for very little cost…
By equipping your field staff with simPRO Mobile digital pens that record what is written as it is being written, what your engineers write is immediately and automatically transmitted via their mobile phone directly back to your office. The information from the form is viewed in a browser based portal where you can edit the information on the form before transferring it directly into your accounting software for immediate billing. Stock used can be recorded and replacement stock ordered daily only as and when required.
The result is that your team can spend more time on the job instead of driving back to the office – meaning your billable hours per week actually increase because they have less need to return to the office simply to lodge paperwork.
The workload on your admin team is spread evenly cross the week reducing the stress and pressure caused by the need to process large numbers of jobs at once – and in eliminating the weekly timesheets chasing game.
Tags: cash flow, Digital Pens, simPRO Mobile, stock level
Sounds like a good idea but how is that better than just getting a pda solution for guys?