When you are a contractor, especially a small independent contractor, the longer it takes you to complete a job, the more cost you typically incur and the less your profit margin. While many contractors do their best to build budgets for their projects, they are impacted by any number of factors beyond their control. But they are also limited by the tools they have available to them when they about the process of estimating a job, tracking time and costs, and managing their receivables, charge-backs, and other post-completion financial management issues.
Until recently estimating how much time, money and resources would be needed for a specific job was pretty much a 'art form' for small contractors because they simply couldn't afford sophisticated 'takeoff software'. But now there are a growing number of programs that work with either 'construction specialty' or 'financial' software for in-depth project plan analysis by identifying the right measurements from blueprints to allow even small contractors to accurately calculate the total cost of labor and materials, develop a budget for a project and even a project schedule. While some of the more sophisticated versions of these apps even have 'electronic measurement' features available, generally most small contractors will plug manual measurements into their 'takeoff' apps to gain estimates. There are more than 50 of these apps, some are Android, some are iOS, some are for your Windows computer, and some are for your Mac. No we haven't given you a list, there are too many for us to research and we aren't construction experts to begin with... but you should be able to identify 3 or 4 and ask for a demo on your own.
Keeping track of construction crews and accurate timekeeping is a second major area that even small contractors should be concerned with. The days of manual time records and punch-clocks should be bygones, with the advent of cloud-based time-keeping apps that can use both GPS and 'geofencing' to track employees when they arrive on the job-site or at their designated work areas automatically, and when they depart the same way. No more letting 'Jimmy Joe' clock in for 'Eddie Don' while he is still hanging out after lunch down at the local tavern. You will know with this kind of time-tracking exactly where your personnel are based on the app on their phone, and if they 'turn-it-off' then they are 'off the clock' (without permission). You can even track their whereabouts when you send them on errands to get supplies for the job site to make certain they didn't make a 'side trip' back to that local tavern in the company truck. Do I need to tell you the names of these, really? I mean if you are reading this article you should be able to go over to the Intuit QuickBooks App Store and find at least a dozen time-keeping apps that can be used for this purpose.
How many small contractors have gotten themselves into financial fixes because they didn't collect their retainage, they simply forgot to invoice for it when it came due? Or they were not invoicing their customers for work-in-progress according to the completion schedule that had been established? Or they forget to hold-out retainage on payments to their own sub-contractors in accordance with their schedule of payments? There are plenty of apps out there designed to help even small contractors deal with these issues, and most of them will work with your accounting software to identify issues so that resolve these issues before they become real problems and you find yourself in the 'poor house.' I suggest you start out by looking at some of the 'contractor/construction' apps in the Intuit QuickBooks App Store if you are using QBO, or use the link from there to see the apps Intuit has listed for QuickBooks Desktop. You can get far more complicated than this, and you will find several we have written about in our First Look and App Aware features over the past several years. Of course you can also find several ProAdvisors who specialize in teaching QuickBooks for Contractors and they can make certain you know of special practices you can set-up inside QBO or QBD to track all of these considerations without outside apps.