Offering a lower estimate than your competitors isn’t as easy as it sounds. It wouldn’t benefit you to underestimate the costs associated with your project and then go over budget later on.
The accounting and job tracking features in construction project management software can help you assess and reduce expenses. However, a tool is only as good as how you use it. Here are four ways this technology can help you manage costs:
Knowing your employees’ specialties can be a big help.
- Create accounts for all employees
Knowing employees specialties, work habits and attitudes can go a long way in helping you determine how long a project will take to complete. For example, let’s say you oversee a crew of carpenters. If Jim can complete the same amount of work as Frank but within a shorter timeframe, you’ll know that Jim is more productive then Frank.
Although this may come across as a crude way of assessing your workers’ capabilities, it does help you to better organize labor. Maybe Frank isn’t as skilled as Jim. So, while you may pay him less, you could also have him work with Jim more often to pick up on a few practices.
- Log daily journals
In Chris Hendrickson and Tung Au’s “Project Management for Construction”, Chapter 12 outlines how to monitor, control and register costs. Although the book was largely written for head contractors, there are some key lessons you can pull from it.
For instance, the authors advised construction professionals to create detailed schedules describing which tasks need to be completed on certain dates. To implement this method in your own workplace, you could ask your employees to write short summaries of the work they complete at the end of each day in your construction accounting software.
Connecting to a cloud-hosted construction management program can boost your accounting capabilities
It may be helpful for both you and your employees to set up tables that allow them to structure project information. For example, you could create a grid that enables them to log in the number of hours worked, the materials used and other relevant items.
- Choose equipment wisely
You may have more than a couple of excavators at your disposal, but that doesn’t mean you should bring every machine you own to a job site. Don Short, president of construction consulting firm Tempest Company, advised sub-contractors to assess their job requirements before selecting equipment.
Mr. Short maintained that cycle times and machine capacity affect the outcomes of your construction costs, but these figures aren’t necessarily black and white. For example, while a larger excavator could haul more earth, will the confines of the job site make it difficult and more time consuming to manoeuvre the machine?
In summary, each of these points comes down to making educated decisions. Acquiring knowledge throughout the project allows you to maintain oversight from start to finish.
