Do you have a rolodex full of customer contact information, a spreadsheet of invoice records, and a job schedule for managing your customer relationships? This method may have worked in the past, however, using multiple methods for tracking requires entering the same data multiple times, using up valuable time. Using these less sophisticated methods, leaves some of your records inaccessible from everywhere but your office. Enter contractor CRM software.

What is a CRM, or customer relationship management system? It is exactly what it sounds like, a system to manage your relationships with customers. With a CRM, you can track all important customer contact details, log communications, and any other quote, work, or payment details. Contractor CRM software allows you to store and access customer information in the cloud and access it anytime and anywhere you have an internet connection. This means no more struggling in the office to entering various information about payments, quotes, or job records into 3 or 4 programs or files. Out in the field, you can easily pull up a past quote or job on your smartphone or tablet to confirm the work you need to perform, or look up a gate code to access a property.

By tracking customer relationships in the same place that you manage the rest of your business, you can easily see which customers you need to follow up with, and identify opportunities to reach out to customers who haven’t used your services recently. You can also automate customer service functions, setting up reminders and sending follow-up emails after jobs to improve customer experience.

It’s never too late or too early to start using contractor CRM software. Use it from the day of your business opens and you’ll have a complete relationship history with each and every one of your clients. However, by adopting CRM software after your business has been open for a bit, not only will you have a powerful new way to manage your potential and current customers but you will also see a huge boost in productivity because of how streamlined customer relationship management process will be.

If you’re reading this, you are probably frustrated with your current system and are ready for an upgrade. If that is the case, TRUE might be a good fit for you; in addition to having a powerful CRM tool, TRUE is a robust ERP allowing you to schedule jobs, track your employees in the field and much more!

Given the immense amount of paperwork involved in construction projects, it is easy to understand why project managers don’t want more to add more to their busy schedules. However, due to the ever-changing nature of construction and the constant updates that happen during the project process, daily construction reports are necessary. Today clients, especially public sector clients, require daily reports on topics ranging from crew safety meetings to subcontractors’ staff hours. Even if your clients don’t require daily reporting, your employees should still make it a habit to create these records both to protect your business, and to create a tool that creates transparency across the firm. Mobile applications for daily reporting are improving how contractors managing their businesses by providing better ways to monitor productivity, improved accuracy of project information and increases profits. To better demonstrate how a daily construction report application, like TRUE Field, can help contractors, we put together this list:

Prevent Little Issues from Turning Into Big Problems

The small issues that can arise on a construction site can range from unreliable suppliers to safety hazards or anything questionable about the site. TRUE Field, daily construction report application, creates a record that can be used to justify actions taken (like additional labor or ordering testing) to prevent any problems from developing into a situation that could stop progress or put the project in jeopardy.

Total Transparency

As much as project managers would like to give each of their projects their undivided attention on a daily basis, however, that is just not possible, especially for busy firms during peak seasons. However, mobile applications such as TRUE Field offer construction firms reporting capabilities that give project managers insight into their crews’ day-to-day operations. When a project is well-documented with daily reports, like those created in TRUE Field, leadership is able to track each project’s progress in real-time at a granular level.

Protection from Litigation

Unfortunately, in the construction industry today, litigation is a very real possibility for contractors across the board. There are numerous reasons why disputes could arise in connection with construction projects; including excessive subcontractor charges, a page of the contract that the client claims to have “missed”, and even arguments over the physical condition of a job site. Regardless of how well a project is managed, and executed, contractors can easily find themselves on either side of a dispute; which is precisely why construction crews should always create daily reports in an easy to read format. TRUE’s software allows photos (and annotations) to be added to reports, creating both an evidence trail for litigation purposes and a visual record for distant stakeholders.

For more information about our Daily Construction Report Application, please visit www.constructtrue.com/true-field.