Managers in smaller companies often have a hand in HR, finance, admin and sales on top of their day-to-day duties. With more tasks to keep an eye on, other parts of the business can become neglected. You might feel like you don’t have enough time to complete the work that is important.
UK small and medium enterprises (SME) spend, on average, 4 hours a week on business admin according to a report carried out by Bionic. That adds up to about a month per year (30 days) on admin alone.
With those kinds of stats, it’s understandable that many businesses are looking for fresh ways to speed up admin. If you can reduce admin, you can also reduce time wasted and save more time for business growth. We’ll take a look at how you can reduce admin with field management software and what the benefits are.
How to Reduce Admin With Field Management Software
We are always on the lookout for ways to save time and get organised in the process. Digitalising your day-to-day tasks helps make long-winded processes straightforward. For the field service industry, that can involve investing in job management software.
Field service management software takes care of client details, invoices, communications and more. It keeps everything you need in one central location, so you don’t need to spend hours manually sifting through physical paperwork. Embracing technology means you can lessen your reliance on paperwork and take a more forward-thinking approach to business. Overall, this helps you improve communication with customers and bring in more business.
Link the software with other tools you use on a daily basis to make business processes smoother for you and your team. This reduces the time you lose switching between programs or copying and pasting details. Send emails directly from your Outlook account, view all your Microsoft 365 appointments and store documents in the SharePoint cloud.
Admin doesn’t have to take up hours of your time at the end of every day. It doesn’t need to be something you dread or put off. With the right tools, you can streamline every step of the process and make complicated paperwork a thing of the past.
Benefits of Reducing Admin With Job Management Software
We developed Clik Remote to help busy service businesses cut down on the back and forth of office admin. Here are some of the reasons why you should be implementing software into your daily work life:
1. Spend more time growing your business
Once you have set up your chosen solution, it will help your business simplify everyday functions. Giving you time to devote to growing your business. Good organisation and efficient management are key to getting your valuable time back.
Focus on reaching out to new customers, improving your equipment and supporting your staff. Once you’ve secured that new business or purchased new equipment, it can all be monitored and reported on.
Digitisation has been a key element for many businesses. IONOS found that just under two-thirds (63%) of SMEs find digitalisation useful for revenue growth. Their research also found that nearly three-quarters (70%) of those asked find it useful for winning new customers.
In a few clicks, you can create a quote for a customer, turn it into a job and invoice it all without having to re-enter any information. No need to search high and low for their details and no copying and pasting.
Customers can accept or reject quotes through their own portal, so you don’t have to follow up every day. Engineers can make sure they fulfil all necessary steps before completing jobs. Everyone has access to what they need instantly.
Those customers will keep coming back thanks to your efficient service. All the paperwork is stored and organised without large filing cabinets. All resulting in more time to continue growing your business even further.
2. Cut down on travel time
Cutting down on travel time also gives you more time to dedicate to growing your business and securing more jobs.
You no longer need to be in the office to schedule your engineers, access your customer database or see how your business is doing. With field management software, all the tools and features you need are right at your fingertips.
If you need a customer’s contact details while out on the road, there’s no need to resort to vague Googling or stopping to call the office. You can access your entire CRM on your phone, laptop or tablet.
Got urgent new jobs coming in and need to re-jig your assigned engineers quickly? No problem. You can easily re-schedule engineers and allocate incoming jobs. Your engineers can get these updated details as soon as you apply them. This way, they don’t waste time travelling back and forth between sites.
3. Access wherever and whenever you need it
Field management software will allow you to manage your business from wherever you need to be. Whether that is checking on your engineers or updating a customer’s quote.
Plan jobs from a layby, post invoices in your kitchen or create quotes onsite. You can manage your business with service management software wherever you are. You just need your mobile tablet or laptop and an internet connection.
Get the work done and the admin tasks out of the way as soon as possible so you can prioritise your time better and organise your team. It makes working from home easy and ensures work can get done even when you are away from the office.
Time to reduce time spent on admin so you can focus on what’s important to your business. Utilise job management software to take care of documents, customer data and much more all in one place. Spend less time searching for what you need with the information at your fingertips in a digital system.
Ready to get started? Try out Clik Service, our central CRM and job management software for free today.
This post was first published in June 2017 and has been edited with updated information.
