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The construction industry is built on good instincts. Ones that have been built from years of experience. There’s no better way to learn than by doing, but the construction industry keeps growing, getting more competitive and technologically advanced. There are more projects, more partners, and more financial information to sift through. Instinct isn’t enough when it comes to making critical financial decisions for your construction company. Whether you’re planning on bidding for jobs or tracking your cash flow you need to have the correct data to make your decision.
Luckily there are ways to use the information your company collects from every job and put it to work. Finding a technology that can align with your business needs and allows you to collect and manipulate your data will help you make the best business decisions. The big question is how can you take all this collected information and turn it into actionable insights.
There are three actionable steps your business can take to embrace technology and financial transformation.
1. Build from the bottom-up
Technology can’t fix broken business processes.
The first thing you need to do is understand your company’s goals, how it works, and most importantly how you want it to work. Speak to people across your organization, in different departments, from field to office, and learn what your business needs are today. How is that information getting fed to the finance team and consider what would be most optimal. Listen to concerns and ideas and get buy-in to any new process that is being introduced.
2. Make your data meaningful
Collecting your data will be useless if it’s not structured in a way to help.
Once you have people on board you need to look at how your business data is collected and stored. If every department is siloed that means their information is too. Because of silos and information saved in paper documents, data organization is one of construction finance’s weakest points. To make your data usable, the vast quantity of information coming in needs to be collected and stored in a structured and shareable way.
3. Invest in the right technology
Technology is the key to driving transformation in your company — choose wisely.
Finding the right technology fit for your business will take some time and research. You need to be clear on what you need from the tech and what it will take to implement it. Every business will have slightly different needs, but there are three things you need to make sure your next technology is a fit.
Cloud-based
Make sure any new financial technology you’re implementing is on the cloud. The finance team is so important to the success of your business that you need them out of the silo and connected to the rest of the company. You want to facilitate knowledge sharing and improve data organization with a single source of truth for your employees to work from.
System agnostic
More point solutions won’t get you the results you want in this day and age. The ideal construction finance software is system agnostic and able to integrate and connect to your legacy systems to elevate how you work now, not add more financial clutter. By connecting the finance team directly to the other systems your company uses they’ll have access to the most up-to-date figures and project information on which to base their forecasts.
Automated
Construction finance suffers from excess double data entry and redundant reporting. Streamline your business and allow technology to take over the more repetitive and time-consuming tasks like data entry, generating reports, and transporting data. With that being taken care of by financial automations your finance team will be able to focus on strategy and more high-value work.
To be successful your finance team needs accurate, timely data, so it’s time to give it to them. Briq is a financial automation platform made specifically for the construction industry. Our platform can connect your systems and people together so they work in harmony in the cloud with no need to email another outdated report ever again. Talk to our experts about how Briq’s powerful automation engine could help you to make better-informed decisions for your company’s future. If you’re looking for more detail on how to embrace financial transformation, download our recent eBook on this topic.
