Running your own construction company often requires doing a number of jobs. That’s because estimating costs, bidding on jobs, overseeing your crew, hiring new employees, and managing your costs are all related tasks. There’s not as much of a clear division as there is in many industries. For example, your payroll and HR costs are also part of your job estimates and bidding concerns.
What this means is that you have to be more than just a manager or a customer relations expert. You also have to be an accountant, a HR professional, and more. That’s why many in the construction industry have turned to computer programs that can help make many of their daily tasks much easier.
Table of Contents
Cost Management
Cost management is one of the most important parts of running a construction company. It helps you accurately estimate the time and cost of a job, determine your profit margins, and keep your project on budget throughout each phase. By using a computer database to help manage your various costs, you’ll be able to tell exactly what it will take to complete a project and exactly how much you’ve currently spent.
Payroll
Handling payroll for your employees on a construction site isn’t always as simple as it is in an office. Some of your crew may be temporary hires, which means you don’t pay them a regular salary or pay benefits. Others may be contractors who are paid an agreed-upon amount that varies depending on the work they’re doing. Then you may have your full-time employees. You also have to make sure you’re taking all of the salaries, payments, and benefit costs into account when you’re creating your estimates.
Keeping track of all of this is much easier when you have construction software on hand that integrates your payroll with your cost management information, especially when you have different types of employees being paid at different rates.
Reporting
Creating reports for your clients is necessary to ensure that they know where the project stands, if it’s going to be done on-schedule, and if it will meet the budget. Creating computer-generated reports can help you do this, but it can also help you see how your crew is performing and your overall profit margin. By pulling data from several years ago, you can easily see how your business has grown or if you need to start finding areas in the budget you can cut back on.
Accounting
Accounting is absolutely vital to any construction company. If you can’t account for everything you spent money on, your clients may insist on auditing your books. This can even lead to legal action if you can’t prove how you spent all of their money. That’s why it’s important that you use a computer program that keeps track of all of your expenses. You’ll need to enter all of your expenses on a regular basis, of course, especially if you have multiple projects going on at the same time. That can get very confusing if you don’t have some kind of system that helps you keep it all organised.
