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The construction industry has come far in using technology to make business more efficient and successful.
Adopting spreadsheets has been a huge boon. But this alone falls short of what technology can achieve. An Excel spreadsheet, for instance, can’t give a project manager the means to quickly share critical information with the finance team, and vice versa.
Say a change order happens. How are its scope, timeline, or other elements that could affect its budget communicated to finance? Certainly not through a spreadsheet. This is one of the countless problems that occur when project management and finance do not effectively share information. Intricate workflows become even more complex, and errors and inefficiencies compound.
Project management software isn’t a total solution
You might think that project management solves all these problems. But while PM software improves on spreadsheets, data is still siloed, preventing your finance and project management teams from working together.
With PM software, your project managers get outdated reports from finance, and the ones they generate for finance are similarly behind due to pulling out-of-date data. Because of this, orders, budgets, payments all risk being inaccurate, and workflows are inefficient.
Again, look at a change order. A project manager can add it to the PM software, but it just sits there. That is where it now lives for weeks.
Breaking down silos with live data
There is a way to connect project data and financial data more immediately, remove these silos, and ensure teams are simultaneously working with clean, up-to-date information. (Hint: It’s Briq.)
Briq is a financial automation platform that solves this project management-financial systems disconnect:
- It’s more than a dashboard
Briq is not a project management dashboard, nor does it replace your PM software. It complements your existing solutions, drawing data from project management, business intelligence, and accounting software. Briq takes data in from all these systems, so their teams have up-to-date information at the ready when they need it.
- Smoother workflows
Because change orders, up-to-date information, and reports from project management teams (and finance teams) are available immediately, Briq brings a smoother cadence to workflows. Instead of the time spent — and lost — pulling data, making reports, sending them to finance, project managers input data into their existing system; Briq shares it automatically to the people defined in the workflow the second it is added. Updates for finance no longer sit on a project manager’s busy to-do list for weeks.
- Enabling collaboration
Because of its ability to connect live data from across systems, Briq helps dynamically bring teams together. They can build out scenarios in ways impossible with just PM software and never could with a mere spreadsheet. And, because of how Briq manages workflows, approvals processes are faster; a task is completed, sent to the next person, and so on. Gone are endless email threads, meetings, and reports.
- The right information for the job
Of course, too much information isn’t always a good thing, whether for regulatory reasons or information overload. When necessary, access to the data can be gated to a role, team, or project.
Briq does this through intelligent project-based security, allowing a single dashboard or workbook to be set up and shared with only the appropriate colleagues. To learn more about how this works, check out our blog on how Briq actively secures clients’ data.
- A holistic view
As mentioned, project managers are busy and are typically balancing multiple tasks. They typically juggle several spreadsheets for different clients or aspects of the job. Briq eliminates this constant spreadsheet swap, giving them a holistic view and a single source of business information. Briq can be tailored to meet their needs — with the specific information they need — so they can more easily do their job and get results.
Think about it: no more waiting weeks for one team to update the other. No mistakes due to out-of-date reports using outdated data. Project management software helps project managers and accounting systems serve accountants. Briq builds connections between both — and other systems — so their users have the same real-time information and teams speak the same language. The result is everyone working faster and better.
Want to find out more? Contact us to set up a demo to see how Briq can move your business beyond project management software.
