Project Profitability Reporting
Surveying companies live and die by the hour. A 15-person company puts in 30,000 hours of work per year. How do you keep track? How efficient is your team? Could your company be more profitable?
I started Qfactor from my observations and hands on experiences working with Quickbooks and its coterie of third-party applications, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, spreadsheets and a variety of other productivity applications.
One of my areas of expertise is documenting a company’s current processes looking for bottlenecks and gaps, then coming up with the right combination of software and procedures to improve data and workflow leading to greater efficiency and profitability. Qfactor’s first surveying client hired our team to do a soup to nuts analysis from the initial phone call requesting a proposal for surveying services to field work to drawings delivered and paid for. Thus was born Qfactor for Surveyors.
Project profitability reporting was one of the recurring tasks requiring extracting data from Quickbooks, Salesforce, other third party applications and the dreaded spreadsheets, transforming the data and creating status and profitability reports. Which I did. Very well. However the reports were completed two weeks after the data had been extracted which did not take into consideration the interceding two weeks. Nor the hurricane that took out solar panels on a construction site. What looked profitable and on time two weeks ago was now in the toilet.
Project Management and Accounting
Project managers tend to need project accounting reports right around the time accountants are focused on payroll. The PM wants their data and paycheck. Accounting can only focus on one. We reduce the friction between project management and accounting by providing data and reports a PM would ask for from accounting.
- Reduce friction between project managers and accounting by providing employee time and financial data in real time through Qfactor.
- Setting up QB service items that reflect the work breakdown structure of what surveying company employees do every day to complete projects. 2-person field survey, parcel research, CAD/GIS, drone field work, professional land surveyors services, etc.
- The service items roll up into fixed fee estimates and invoicing for boundary & topographic surveys, ALTA/NSPS titles surveys, flood elevation certificates, etc.
- Set up revenue accounts that represent the buckets income should be tracked in and linking them to the appropriate service items.
- Using the ‘sub-customer’ feature in Quickbooks to create numbered projects nested under the actual customer. This is especially useful for repeat customers with several projects. In the case of construction staking projects sub-customers of sub-customers can be created for each phase of construction.
These are easy to implement recommendations that produce a great deal of insight into what your team does and shows where you are profitable and where you are not. Over the long term, this information will help make you more profitable by focusing on what works and fixing that which doesn’t.
