The following content is sponsored by Briq.
The WIP is the pulse on your business’s health, but too often, it’s plagued with inconsistencies. To an outsider, the WIP — showing the status of a construction project — sounds like a simple document. It shows if you’re on track and over- or under-billed when compared to the project timeline. But industry folk understand this refers to a complex cash flow mapped against the project in question. It follows who is responsible for what payments and relies on timely and accurate information fed from multiple sources.
Wow. How do we manage to get all these construction projects to completion when the financial tracking of each project is so complex? At times it seems like a miracle. But today, there is a more modern way to create your WIP and run your projects.
Connect the field and office
Currently, spreadsheets are how your PMs and finance team get the majority of their work done. But they’re so inefficient. The way we use spreadsheets as an industry is cumbersome and slows us down — it’s all manual data entry across multiple teams. This results in duplicate data, non-standardized entries, and a host of human errors like lost documentation. These errors and inconsistencies are a problem in construction because people need to be agile and make decisions on a job based on how it’s performing, but it’s no good if we’re making decisions on bad information. The slower we are to recognize an issue on a job, the more money it’s going to cost to solve it.
The WIP is showing you the health of your jobs — your business — and so relies on up-to-date information, and the best way for it all to be reliable is by connecting the field and office with technology that keeps them on track. Mapping your current processes, figuring out how to improve them, and implementing smarter automated workflows to connect the work of every department is the best way to improve communication and knowledge sharing.
Stop waiting on reports
When your departments are connected, there’s no such thing as waiting on emailed reports or searching through massive spreadsheets to find the best information to share with the finance team. Everyone has access to the information they need as they need it so reports can be pulled at any time. The information is reliably up-to-date because your automated workflows will prompt people to complete data entry and project updates on time.
Further, when you have this intelligent way of working locked down, the finance team can start rolling forecasts, meaning when you build out your WIP, you can be sure the information is current and the mapped trajectory of the project is accurate.
Work from a unified source of financial data
There’s peace of mind regarding your WIP when it’s certain that there is only one single source of the financial health of your business. All the aforementioned pieces are nothing if your teams aren’t working together from one knowledge source. That’s why it’s so important to connect your systems and build your processes in a technology that allows everyone to work collaboratively.
When your WIPs can be compiled efficiently with accurate and timely information, you have the best information available to run and grow your business. Briq is a financial automation platform that gives you more visibility and control over your business data than ever before. From data entry automation to the ability to manipulate vast amounts of numbers in just a few clicks and a lot more in between, Briq will automate your WIPs so you can rest easy that this necessary project document is always accurate.