Think about your drive time to and from projects. Factor in the labor involved when loading and unloading equipment from your truck. Now add in impromptu meetings with architects, builders and other subcontractors on projects. Are you and your employees billing your clients for these unavoidable “time leaks?” If not, you could be jeopardizing your company’s profitability—and in a big way.
A 4 Hour Work Day?
According to a study by The Shiner Group entitled “Understanding Labor Cost, Productivity and Efficiency,” on average only four hours and 24 minutes per day of an employee’s time is actually billed to a project. That’s only 50 to 60 percent of your technician’s total work time, with nearly half of their day spent on tasks that fail to add to your bottom line.
In fact, given statistics revealed by a CE Pro Labor Rates Study, you’re not just missing out on profits, you’re actually wasting money. As stated in this study, the average billable rate nationwide for an installation technician is $95.98. Using the average billable time noted above of four hours and 24 minutes as a base, this means that a technician who is earning a wage of $25 an hour is actually costing you $39.06 per hour.
Simplify the Task of Logging Time
It might be time to get a handle on how employees are using their time and implement a more efficient way of making the most of your billable hours. ConnectWise has developed software called Manage specifically for this task. When techs are on a project, it’s often easy for them to forget to record their billable time. Manage enables company owners and project managers to monitor this and dispatch a friendly reminder to their team members to log their time. After all, no client project is too small to track. Phone calls, emails, text messages, travel time, research, and other duties related to the project can quickly add up, and failure to log these will eat away at your profits.
At the same time, a mobile app available on iOS and Android, enables techs to conveniently keep notes about their day, minimizing the chance for “time leaks.” To make it easy to track their time and ensure billing accuracy, they can engage a stopwatch feature.
Consistency of Billable Time
After all of the information has been curated by Manage, it creates a report automatically, categorizing work by billable and non-billable time. The breakdown of time spent on certain tasks makes it easy to identify where you can improve efficiency, and enables you to provide your clients with a more detailed invoice. For example, by allowing your employees to track ALL time, not just billable time, you can determine what administrative duties might be keeping your team from billable tasks, and with some adjustments increase your revenues.
When ConnectWise Manage is paired with other ConnectWise products like Sell, you can create custom templates that enable the way in which employees record their billable and non-billable time to be consistent company wide. When time spent on repeatable tasks can be easily identified, you’ll be able to more effectively manage the goals of your company and develop strategies for greater efficiency and profitability.
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