For many construction business owners, one of the most stressful and dreaded parts of the job is preparing for, then submitting and competing in the bidding process to get a project and start putting people to work. It’s easy to understand why this is such an unpleasant part of the business. Construction business owners are in this because they know how to get the job done with a competent team. Juggling numbers and submitting a bid, hoping to win it against other businesses, while necessary, is not a core component to doing a good job.
But even the bidding process itself can create some problems before any ground is even broken. Many business owners have found themselves facing challenges right at the bidding stage alone. However, some software, like ClearTaskSolutions, may help with bidding issues, even in the face of new challenges like labor shortages and tariffs. Here’s how.
The Cost Overrun Problem
One of the biggest bidding problems that construction business owners come up against is avoiding a reputation for deliberately underbidding in the hopes of getting a project, with no realistic way to way to meet that bid amount, resulting in cost overruns. Most people expect that some issues will cause costs to go up in some respects, especially with outdoor projects where the weather will not always cooperate.
It’s not a good idea to get a reputation for deliberately underbidding. Underbidding not only hurts the industry in general by making clients more paranoid, but it also hurts your business name in particular as someone that deceives clients with low numbers who then fails to deliver. One of the key ways that cost overruns can be managed is by looking at a factor that is under your direct control, and that is labor.
Labor Management Keeps Numbers In Check
New technologies and automation, such as a time punch clock app, can make a huge difference in ensuring that when it comes to labor, costs don’t spiral out of control. The time punch method is one of the fairest ways to ensure that people who work for a day get paid for a day, but in the past, it was easy for some unscrupulous workers to compromise both job quality and integrity by not working at all yet getting paid for the work. The “buddy punch” is symptomatic of this problem, where a friend punches for a worker, thus recording an “honest day’s work” even if that person didn’t show up.
An employee time clock app, however, eliminates these potential areas of cost overrun leaks, by preventing these cheats from occurring. Individual employees get their software installed on their own devices, such as ClearTaskSolutions, and this means not only legitimate punch-ins occurring, but GPS tracking can even show you the location a punch in occurs at.
Overtime Management
Sometimes, to get a project done, especially if delays occurred, you need to make up lost time. However, that time, especially if it’s overtime, needs to be correctly tracked, to make sure that people who put in the extra effort get paid.
Overtime costs, especially if they are not accurately managed, and especially if fraudulent overtime claims are made, can be another contributor to cost overruns related to labor. A time clock app ensures that not only are employees being accurately tracked, admin and finance departments have easy access to this data when the time comes, to ensure that numbers add up.
If you want to make sure your bids are accurate, one way to do so is to ensure your employee time tracking is accurate.
