Working remotely or in the field comes with many challenges. For one, you have to organise your jobs, tasks, projects and staff yourself while keeping a close eye on your overall operations. Here are some tips that should help you stay focused and productive even when you’re working on your own terms.
Time Tracking
When your employees are mostly in field workers, you are definitely entitled to ask them to give you a proper account of the time spent on actual work. In addition, sometimes the time required for a task’s completion can be much higher than what was initially estimated. Time tracking apps can help you analyse the time you take for tasks with detailed reports. You can get an estimate of how much time a group of tasks takes and plan your future projects accordingly.
Project Management Tools
With most service businesses, it is not uncommon to get overburdened and have multiple tasks running simultaneously. And in some cases, a standard time-tracking tool will just not suffice. When you need a way to keep track of everything using a single tool, especially while collaborating with employees and freelancers, a project management tool should help sort things out for you. Project management tools help you streamline workflows by keeping everyone in the loop for tasks that involve them.
File Sharing
There’re few worse feelings than working hard on a job or a project for days only to lose all your work owing to a crashed hard drive. Most large corporations and organizations generally have a period backup running for their data and assets. So why not have the same when you’re in the field? You might also be using applications that allow you to directly communicate and send files to your different staff members therefore enabling real-time updates and a consistent flow of communication.
Invoice generator
When running a field service business, efficiency is what you need and this starts with reducing paperwork and the time spent on administrative duties. Being out in the field is a very challenging task in itself, having to manage finances on top of it can become very overwhelming. To rely on a platform to generate your quotes/invoices instantly and keep you up to speed with your activities revenue is a real competitive advantage. A piece of software could do for you the tedious tasks that slow you down.
Bottom line, being able to track time, manage project/staff, share information and generate invoices on the spot are crucial elements for service businesses. Work efficiency and quality can be seriously affected if there is a lack of monitoring in these domains. The key, is to find the field service management software that will take care of everything for you and give you the 360 overview that you need from scheduling through to invoicing and creating thorough reports. Finally, the right platform will also enable you to integrate with applications like Dropbox, Xero, QuickBooks and so much more to allow you to have all your business tools gathered in the one place.
