End-of-month or end-of-week scrambles to get invoices together to bill your customers can be a soul-wrenching hassle. Especially when the systems you have to do your job billing are spread out between spreadsheets, paper, a stack of invoices & purchase orders and some reports from financial. Sitting in a dark office on a Friday night, trying to reconcile it all into invoices while your buddies are at the hockey game – isn’t the best use of your time. On top of that, you’re faintly hoping that, fingers crossed, your customers don’t dispute or find discrepancies with them this time – and you can for once get paid within 30 days. Chances are, though, if everything doesn’t line-up perfectly, there will be phone calls, corrections and the payment will end up being over 120 days.
Invoicing in construction projects has its share of complications that aren’t found in other businesses. Progress draws, holdbacks, time & material transaction billing, retainage, flowing through 3rd party direct costs, split-billing, all the complexities around markup on materials & equipment, and much more. Add to that, the knocks to a company’s reputation that go along with invoicing mistakes, double billing or missed billing. To get it right and keep it simple requires a highly organized, flexible and thorough solution.
Ultimately, everyone’s in business to get paid, and to get paid on time. Companies and projects can come to an abrupt and grinding halt if they struggle with cash flow issues. A number of years ago, a very smart man – a man who was seasoned in building many businesses – pointed his fat, hard-working finger at me and said, “You can get a lot of things wrong, but you gotta know how to bill your customers.”
This is where a software solution that’s been designed to manage the ins & outs of construction projects, that also has a flexible, organized and easy-to-use invoicing system built-in; is critical for the success of both projects and companies. Job billing doesn’t have to be a painful and time-consuming hassle – not if you have the right construction project software solution in place to take on the heavy-lifting.