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Companies don’t have the power to prevent a recession from happening. However, they do have the power to prepare and protect their businesses from the consequences of supply chain issues and fluctuating costs in a changing economy.
With financial technology on the rise, there are more tools than ever to help construction companies insulate their business from the effects of a recession. Here are four key ways you can leverage technology to recession-proof your business.
Forecast your revenue more frequently and accurately
The future of the economy is impossible to predict. The same should not be true for your business. There’s a wealth of data available in each company that can tell you where your business is headed. However, most construction companies don’t forecast nearly enough. In a recession, this can be a fatal error for your company.
When companies don’t forecast frequently enough, they’re operating with incomplete information. What costs are going to impact the company most in the next quarter? How will budgets be adjusted to meet the needs of the business? What do labor costs look like? These questions need to be answered in order to make swift, effective business decisions.
Technology can help. The biggest barrier to forecasting is typically the amount of time it takes to do. The key is to outsource that time to financial automation software.
Teams often have to spend hours on email chains and formatting Excel sheets, but the software doesn’t. It knows where to get the data, how to perform the calculations, and has the proper formulas already built in. Now, forecasting can be done with a few simple clicks. With the right technology, your business gets the frequent and accurate forecasts it needs to thrive despite economic challenges.
Locate and address weak points in your business
A recession strains companies. It’s under that strain that the weakest links become the biggest problems for the business. Whether it’s bad supplier relationships, equipment management problems, or the speed of your AP processes, these weak points can cause catastrophic problems under pressure. Many companies don’t even know where these weak points are until it’s already too late.
Financial automation software can help identify exactly where those weak points are. The software is constantly taking in all of your company's data. When it spots an area that’s underperforming, causing issues, or abnormal, it can flag it so that your team can identify it.
When a business understands where its weak points are, it’s poised to make swift, effective decisions to mitigate issues before they arise. Before a problem even occurs, your departments will already know exactly where they’ll need to focus their efforts. Instead of losing precious time and resources playing catch up to problems that already happened, your business can take proactive action.
Analyze and capitalize on the right projects
Not all projects are made equal. Depending on your company's unique skills and strengths, certain types of projects will net better results than others. In a time of economic crisis, identifying your most profitable projects is essential.
Financial software allows you to identify these projects through comprehensive, trend analysis. The software takes all of your financial data across projects to inform your business where the most money is being made and lost. The data can get even more precise than the project level. The right software can inform you of the common factors that make certain projects more profitable than others. This information can allow you to enhance and improve underperforming projects and increase success.
Leverage financial analytics to lean into your profit and focus on the right decisions for the company when it needs it most.
Empower your employees for better performance
The cost of hiring new talent is often much higher than the cost of retaining current employees. In times when the employment market is suffering, this issue becomes an even greater priority. It’s essential to make sure your teams have everything they need to perform their job both comfortably and efficiently.
The right combination of software can give each of your employees the power to do more with their time, and even increase engagement in the workplace. For example, invoice automation spares your AP team hours of opening pdf after pdf and repetitively entering numbers. Instead, they’re focused on analysis, allocation, and verification of data. This allows them to get far more work done with less effort and increased engagement.
The right technology stack makes each employee more effective, efficient, and engaged in their work. When this happens construction companies can not only keep up in a recession, they may even be able to scale the business up.
Invest in a platform that supports the business
Though the benefits of technology are clear, finding the right fit for your business isn’t always easy. Investing in technology is a big step, so it’s important to select the best fit. At Briq, we’ve built our financial automation platform to address the needs of construction companies. By drawing on decades of experience from leading professionals in the industry, Briq is the platform from which construction companies can run their business. It incorporates all of the technologies listed above and more in a format made for the construction industry.
Contact us here to schedule a demo and find out how Briq uses robotic processes and AI to help you make smarter decisions, improve performance, and better collaborate.
