Despite the digital revolution transforming our lives over the past 30 years, over 75% of tradespeople still use traditional methods to do their business admin. Pen and paper job sheets, spreadsheets, emails, and other offline tools are time-consuming and inefficient. Too often they can lead to poor cash flow, lower profits, increased stress and, if you’re not careful, burn out.
Job management software, such as Fergus, can transform your business. By centralising and integrating all aspects of a job, it increases efficiency and decreases waste. It is user-friendly and helps business owners spend less time on admin and more time doing the things they enjoy. Gone are the disjointed methods mentioned above, and by using Fergus in their place, you can manage the whole cycle, from quote to completion and final payment. It’s all seamlessly integrated.
The Fergus app can help you to stay on top of your finances and keep abreast of your labour and material costs. With the easy to read status board, you can see the progress of each ongoing job at a glance. From pricing all the way through to collecting payment. Not only that, but Fergus is the only system which tracks labour and materials back to the job in real time.
Easy to use
By uploading your price books, your materials costs will appear in quotes automatically. You can adjust pricing by creating tiered mark-ups for different clients or job types. For example, you can adjust mark-ups on materials for smaller jobs, or charge more for one-off customers, or offer discounts where beneficial such as for repeat customers.
With Fergus’s visual calendar, you can have a complete overview of what jobs are booked and for when. You can assign your team members to a job in seconds by just dragging and dropping them onto it. They’ll automatically receive notification by the app, so there’s no need to phone or meet with them. You can see where your team are and where they’ve been, see how long they’ve been on a job, and whether or not they’ll make the next one on time. You can assign tasks to team members, book equipment and kit, and keep in touch with the whole team via the app
With Fergus, you can create job cards with ease, adding a new customer, or existing customer, and then assign the job to your team. They’ll be alerted automatically. You can break bigger jobs down into milestones, which makes managing costs and progress easier, and make changes to a job in an instant. You can log the cost and purchase of all materials, and track time spent on a job. You can fill out templated gas and electricity certificates, log hazards and on-site incidents, and record sign offs, all within the app.
Stay profitable
You can see an overview of each job, too. So, whether it’s going over budget or taking longer than planned, you’ll be able to see what’s going wrong at a glance and fix it, so keeping that all-important margin.
Invoicing is made simple, too. You should spend an hour a day on invoices, and Fergus helps you to generate them quickly and efficiently because everything you’ve done on a job is logged on the app. For example, by logging the cost and purchase of all materials, and tracking the time spent on a job, all this will be fed into the invoice automatically at the end. You can also follow up late payment with automatic SMS messages.
Fergus was founded by veteran plumber Dan Pollard, in 2014, to solve the problems that had plagued his business for years. It is a system you can trust to get your business into shape and give you more time for the people and things you love.
Case study
Edinburgh-based Allied Trade Plumbing & Heating uses Fergus to manage its business of 11 people. Its founder, Cameron Burt, started thinking about ways he could use technology to streamline his operations and make things more efficient.
“The beauty of Fergus is that even before a job even starts, we know how much money we’re going to make on it – it puts us in a position where we always win,” says Burt.
“We’ve spoken about it a few times in the office and we all agree that ‘if you can think about it, chances are that Fergus can do it.’ The business has been growing steadily since and we’re attributing a lot of that to Fergus.”
For more details and to book a demo visit: fergus.com
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