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Finance may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of construction. Probably first are the houses, stadiums, and skyscrapers that are the products of the industry: the literal brick and mortar that is the foundation of it. The infrastructure that connects us all together.
But it’s time finance was top of mind.
In the modern construction business, everything is built on a solid financial foundation. Your business is not growing, and it’s not taking on more projects, without a solid understanding of your finances.
Build financial literacy in construction
Building financial literacy in construction is a necessary move for the industry as a whole. Most construction professionals get into the business for their love of operations, not finance. They focus instead on scheduling and work done in the field but not what it all means in relation to the financial health of the company.
Project managers, operations, and finance all need to be having the same conversation, and to do that you need to ensure they’re working from the same set of numbers. Presently, for many companies, that seems like an impossibility. From massive spreadsheets to out-of-date financial reports and the slow job of tedious data inputting, nobody is talking about the same numbers.
Briq clients are able to dig into the financial dimension of managing a project. Thanks to the transparency Briq provides into timely, accurate numbers from across the business, PMs can get better insight and understanding into the financial management process. Now, your PMs are aware of the impacts that the work is having on the bottom line in terms of profitability, and everyone is having more informed conversations.
Increase accuracy for all departments
Every department in your construction company needs to be able to know what jobs performed well and why so they can make the best financial decisions moving forward. Those decisions rely on the ability to draw the data from past performance and use it to forecast labor, equipment, materials, and success (read: profit). In that way, it’s important to remember that the financial process in construction isn’t linear, it’s a loop. Everything learned from the previous iteration needs to be fed into the upcoming financial plan to inform the decision-making process.
With Briq, your business departments will have present and historical financial and business information at their fingertips that they may not have easy access to otherwise.
Our platform and personalized dashboards are fed with constantly updating information from across your business letting all departments have their finger on the pulse of what is happening. That means your PM, your financial manager, field operations, business development, everyone with permissions to view the data can understand if you are performing well, what types of projects are doing well, and what kind of clients you do well with. All this knowledge bodes well for the future jobs you will decide to take on
More than cross-collaboration
Cross-collaboration is not only the process of managing work between departments, it’s also driving the business decisions of which jobs come next. You need to create and feed that information feedback loop that helps all teams add value.
What happens step-by-step in the process of bidding on jobs, creating estimates, creating budgets, executing the work, and analyzing your performance? Where does the data go? Is it spread out across teams, off the cloud, and in static, offline spreadsheets? How do you learn from data points that are so disparate?
The missing piece here is Briq.
Briq can help your teams learn from each job as you can dynamically analyze performance, bringing in past data to identify trends, wins, and losses easily across time. You’re measuring outcomes of the past that inform the future. Now, your business development team knows what jobs you have the most success in and can focus on bidding for jobs for which you are already set up for success.
Briq clients can look at things like headcount plans months in advance, identify gaps in work and labor and make data-informed decisions about what kinds of jobs to take. They can make smart business decisions about what short-term or long-term jobs will best suit their access to tradespeople and available laborers. Instead of barely being able to see more than eight days out, they can plan for their quarter easily.
Invest in the process to reap the rewards
Automation has the ability to give your team back precious time that can be better spent on bigger projects. Bots aren’t replacing people in the office, they are running predictable tasks to free up the time of your talented people so they can do more for your business.
Look at it this way, if each of your PMs spends four hours per month filling out their project forecasting to WIP and you have 18 PMs, that’s 72 hours of manual repetitive labor that can be automated. It’s $10,000 of salaried pay per month that should be equating to more than data entry for your business.
Briq’s financial automations will take a fraction of that time and be working in the background always. Not only is repetitive, time-consuming work being updated in real-time, but you know the data your PM is working from is accurate.
Rather than spending 80% of their time looking for information or manually inputting data and 20% of their time understanding and putting context to it. The reverse is now true. Your people have the time to put into weaving the story your financial data is telling.
With Briq, you can make better decisions because you have better information at your fingertips.
Introduce financial strategy to your planning
Essentially, if you want to be running a modern construction business that can grow and take on bigger and better projects, or even just be more confident in the projects you are taking on you need to include financial strategy into your planning. This can be hard to do when closeouts don’t happen regularly or you are looking at spreadsheets with incorrect information.
It’s time to build, innovate, and win with Briq.
The Briq financial platform offers your company a way to work that is more personalized, collaborative, connected, timely, and accurate than ever before. It helps your company to be able to better predict profit, labor needs, and plan for the future.
It may sound redundant, but in order to change you need to be prepared to change and that means embracing innovation. Not just in by buying new tech but by being willing to examine your processes and update them where is necessary. We build the Briq you will use with you: streamlined processes, innovative solutions, and automated workflows that will help your business collect more accurate financial information that will help you work better.
