How to reduce overhead spend and stabilize your resource planning

As construction companies grow, administrative tasks grow with them. With more jobs come more people, tasks, subcontractors, equipment, and money to account for and track.

This list of admin tasks probably looks familiar to you: 

• Job initiation
• Subcontractor set-up
• Budget entry
• (Double) data entry between systems
• Emailing reports and files
• Consolidating information
• Project forecasting
• Performance scorecards

You may even think this list doesn’t cover the lot of it, and that may be true. But it further proves the point: that this growing list of tasks takes more and more precious time from your employees. Time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Let’s explore how your resources are being stretched thin and what can be done to prevent any losses.

Indirect costs are costing you money 

All the tasks listed before—and more—are important ones that keep your construction business operating. Every detail of every job must be documented and shared with the correct teams so you can track progress, address blockers, and turn a profit. But as you grow, these tasks—which, perhaps, were able to be managed by a small team of two early on—become cumbersome and huge time sucks.

When there are thousands of invoices to input and hundreds of suppliers to track your finance team is spending most of their time on data entry rather than working on big picture projects that help improve strategy and grow profit. To that end, it’s time to eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

Automation is the answer

Creating workflows to automate repetitive tasks replaces data entry tasks and helps minimize potential human error from multiple inputs. By automating these processes there is more time to be proactive with the information on hand. Rather than spending days inputting information at the end of the month, your team can analyze and utilize the data at hand. Better and faster learnings can be applied to forecasting and more informed decisions can be made. No more playing catchup on manual processes every time the month closes. Consider for your team, for your profit, how much of the month-end are manual processes that could be automated.

If you are considering automation as an answer to saving your team time and your business money, Briq can help. By automating financial processes, Briq can stabilize your overhead. Our automations, built for your business, work around the clock pushing and pulling information to and from your source systems, keeping everyone up-to-date with the most relevant information. 

Technology can boost retention

There’s an added benefit to automation that may not be immediately clear but could be a massive value-added benefit to your company. Young talent, particularly in construction, is hard to retain. This is mostly to do young hires working with processes that are manual and perceived as out dated. Implementing technology that can automate mundane tasks makes your business more modern and efficient. This in turn encourages young workers to stay as they can do their job more efficiently and effectively.

Stabilize your resource planning

Automation can make resource planning a breeze. Briq creates a collaborative environment for resource planning where everything can be entered at the project level. From there, information flows seamlessly upstream to executive-level reporting. There is no time wasted on downloading and emailing reports that become quickly outdated as everything is done in the platform automatically. As all information is contained in the platform it is easy to see reports at a high level and have the ability to quickly drill into the details without time wasted on additional requests sent to the wider team.

Evolve your resource planning to be real-time, collaborative, and connected. With Briq, most of your planning tasks will be done automatically meaning you’ll see the bigger picture of your projects clearer than ever before.

Equipment Planning

• Track equipment use.
• Assign the right equipment to each project with ease.
• Better understand equipment use and needs.

Labor Planning

• Use past job data to hire better for upcoming projects.
• Manage and track your labor force with ease.
• Use scenario planning to think ahead.

Materials Planning

• Manage materials use and ensure teams are well-equipped.
• Make sure materials don’t go to waste.
• Track use and needs to better prepare for similar jobs in the future.

Automation isn’t just data entry, it means you have a full and real-time holistic understanding of your business on both a project and company level. Allow your teams to reach their full potential by taking away time-wasting tasks that are error-prone and repetitive. A financial automation platform like Briq is here to make your business and people perform at their best. Speak to our experts to learn more.