How to cut your construction administration time in half
As part of the construction industry, you know, there is much more to running a construction business than just building projects. Construction managers, contractors and business owners can spend 40% of their day on mundane tasks such as administrative (admin) duties, and who wants to do that when there is so much more life to get on with. So, let’s look at what some of these tasks are and how to cut the time you spend on them in half.
The realm of construction admin is varied and includes a range of tasks, so we’ve broken them down into three sections, management, money and paperwork.
Management
In this section we look at the tedious work involved in controlling and maintaining the people and the assets necessary to running a successful construction business.
- Assets – tools and equipment need to be regularly maintained. Making schedules necessary, so their downtime doesn’t clash with their workdays.
- Communication – one of the hardest things to manage is communication between management, contractors, laborers, and investors, but it is a necessary part of construction admin.
- Tracking – to complete a successful build you must ensure timeframes are being met, issues are dealt with quickly and equipment is where it is meant to be.
Money
Just like any other industry, money is what drives your construction business. You must keep records of the incomings and your outgoings of, not only your business, but of individual projects as well. Even if you have a bookkeeper to pay the invoices and balance the books, staying on budget means knowing your project expenses are on track.
Paperwork
A big part of construction admin is paperwork. Whether it is progress reports, minutes of a meeting, an incident report, timesheets or contracts, they all take time to produce, read and file. A single construction job has many pieces of paperwork attached to it that needs to be filed and stored, where it can be easily found when it’s needed. Not only does this take time but space too.
As you can see from these very simple examples, construction admin involves a lot of work taking up a lot of time. So, let’s look at how to cut that time in half.
Software
The answer is simple, use estimating and construction management software. On the one platform you can monitor and manage schedules, equipment, budgets, progress and much more. All communication can be made on the one platform; keeping it together, easily accessed and can be done in real-time, on the spot, from almost anywhere. Our cloud-based system also stores all the project’s documents in the one place where it is easily retrieved. The software can be accessed directly from your smartphone, tablet or laptop anywhere there is an internet connection.
Unfortunately, we can’t halve the number of meetings you have to attend, but Buildxact offers a good interface that is affordable; an easy solution for someone wanting to cut their construction admin time in half. Try our 14-day free trial or book a demo today.
