Job Management, You are not using a spreadsheet, right?

If you are in the service industry and have a few staff members, you could be a repair shop or a commercial cleaning service, a massage therapist or a building inspector, you need to manage bookings, staff availability, track hours and most importantly send invoices on time to get paid sooner.

If you are using a spread sheet and an outlook calendar to track your bookings and staff appointments then please read on as there are more efficient ways to manage this.

Accounting Package Add-ons

The first option to consider would be to look for add-ons for your accounting package. If you are a traditional MYOB user then there are number of options available including ServiceM8 and Smart Jobs. These solutions come with a mobile app and integrate directly to MYOB for invoicing. Their price starts from 50c a job or $20/user/month.

If you are using Xero as your accounting package, WorkflowMax is a popular choice for your job tracking, it has a very easy to use interface and also comes with a mobile app. Their price ranges from $25 for a single user to $199 for unlimited users.

Mobile Workforce Management Solutions

If you have 10+ mobile workforce staff then you may consider using a fully featured mobile workforce management software like Syncroteam, Fleetmatics Work and Connect2Field.

These products efficiently manage mobile workers, simplify their processes and optimise their costs. In addition to that they offer scheduling assistant dispatching, tracking and reporting capabilities.

If you are already using a customer relations management software like Zoho or Sugar CRM you may want to discuss integration options with your CRM specialist as these tools have built-in support for job management and tracking.

Custom Software

Ok, so you have looked around and none of the job management software suits your needs, some are too complex, require constant attention in keeping it up to date or may be it just simply does not fit with your process. This is exactly the same situation when you want to buy a house, you look around, and you might like a house but the house is may be too big or too small, has low ceilings or no storage and has no garden or too many trees. This is when you need to decide whether to compromise and get the best what is out there or build your own.

In the software world it is called custom software development which can be built exactly the way you want it. It will fit your process and can be customised according to your requirements.

Summary

If you are a small business and want to take advantage of the digital revolution it is recommended to use one of the off the shelf products to optimise your processes, however if you are not happy with the feature set offered by these off the shelf products, you can look at building your custom software solution.

YZM Technologies is a Perth based Software Company specialising in building custom software, databases and mobile apps and helping small businesses achieve better results by optimising business processes.