Managing jobs is what Chronicle is all about. Chronicle gives you real-time information for each job so you know what's going on, how close each job is to being done, when jobs are scheduled, who's working on them, and so on.
Chronicle makes it easy to:
- improve your planning, evaluation, and follow up;
- manage activities and make sure important activities aren't missed;
- manage who's assigned to which job, schedule your people, and quickly identify other job related people like subcontractors and insurance agents;
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maintain all documentation and communication related to jobs so it's easy to find and impossible to lose,
- do budgeting and job costing;
- manage multiple jobs per customer and quickly find job history.
Improving your planning, evaluation, and follow up
Different types of jobs require different types of planning and follow up. And you may be budgeting one type of job well while consistently going over budget on another type of job. Chronicle's job tracking by department gives you a handle on which is which, and helps you plan and follow up more effectively.
Better activity management
There are two important aspects to monitoring the activities that must be done to complete the job.
First, you must make sure that important activities don't get left out. You want to maintain quality and consistency; if five different activities are needed to do a particular job, it just isn't acceptable if you only do four of them. Chronicle's activity templates let you define in advance what activities are typically a part of a particular type of job, so no key parts of the job get accidentally skipped.
Second, you need to make sure that all activities get done. Chronicle's activity features let you see progress on each activity and mark activities that are done so you always have a clear picture of what still needs to be done, or so you know that all activities are done and the job is ready to be billed. This avoids problems of finishing one part of the job while leaving another service line hanging, or of failing to bill for the job in timely fashion.
Better people management
For your employees, Chronicle's scheduler lets you keep track of who's doing what when. You can also set up reminders for your employees so important details and events don't get forgotten.
For other people like subcontractors and insurance adjustors, you can quickly identify and communicate with anyone associated with the job. And when payment isn't timely from an insurance adjustor, you can quickly identify all of the jobs that the adjustor is associated with and easily follow up on all outstanding payments at once.
Better tracking of job related communication and documents
Chronicle serves as your filing cabinet, keeping all documents and communication related to a job: estimates, letters, photos, spreadsheets, emails, or whatever else you might happen to have. Managing your documents with Chronicle makes sure that documents never get lost; enables you to find, fax, and email documents in seconds; provides a complete audit trail of who each document was sent to and when; lets you generate forms with job information already on them; and lets you quickly determine which documents are missing for any job. See Managing Documents for more detail.
Budgeting and job costing
Exactly how many hours are going to each job? How many hours is a particular type of activity taking? Are you spending more or less than you budgeted? What's your profit margin on a particular job or activity?
Chronicle lets you determine exactly how much each job costs you and how much you're making on each type of activity in that job. It lets you know when you've spent more on labor than you budgeted. It can also automatically calculate bonuses for employees who consistently perform their tasks in less than budgeted time.
You can have Chronicle just monitor the labor expenses, or you can set it up to get materials and sub-contracting expenses from your accounting program so you can monitor the complete job cost. With the right setup in your accounting program, you can monitor costs either for the entire job or by department.
See job costing and budgeting for more details.
Managing multiple jobs per customer and quickly finding job history
Chronicle lets you manage multiple jobs per customer. It also keeps a permanent record of all your jobs, so that when a customer or adjustor calls up with a question about a job that you did six months ago, or even two years ago, you no longer have to hunt for the folder; the information is still only seconds away.
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