Mobility: The Most Effective Expense Management System in Landscaping?
A growing number of residential as well as commercial property owners are going for colorful flower beds, manicured hedges, and mesmerizing outdoor features. They don’t just beautify a property, but also make a statement and add to its value. With the demand for landscaping services on the rise, landscapers are finding it more and more difficult to keep up. Adding to the challenge is the fact that landscaping is both a labor and capital-intensive business, which acts as an entry barrier for new players in this industry.
A professional landscaping operation requires heavy machinery and skilled labor force to operate it. Efficient management of costs related to machinery, labor, downtime, and more can make a huge impact on the profit margins. To create a profitable business, it is imperative for the company to stay on top of these numbers, and technology can definitely help them in their mission. There is a multitude of mobility solutions in the market today that enables landscaping businesses to boost their bottom line as well as offer more specialized services. Here is a glimpse into what these mobility solutions can do for businesses.
Mobilizing the Workers Efficiently
With mobility solutions, managers do not have to actually be at the project site to allocate jobs to the workers. One supervisor can oversee multiple projects simultaneously with the power of mobility. They can organize crews and dispatch them to the project site, depending on the project’s size, budget, and other factors. Today, mobility service providers offer sophisticated solutions that allow companies to track the employees, monitor the time spent by the labor at the site and also access timesheets to ascertain the level of productivity on each site. Such granular information allows companies to make better decisions regarding resource management.
Capture Costs Effectively
Physical bills are very easy to lose. From an expense receipt for an extra bag of cement to an invoice from the tile shop, many of these receipts are in the form of printouts and are misplaced easily. With mobile devices and one central repository for storing all such accounting documents, businesses only need to capture receipts using their phone camera. A new generation of software solutions can automatically pick the name of the vendor and enter the expense details directly into the respective business accounts. No more having have to carry receipts. Since the lead time to process bills is reduced, it will lead to better cash flow. One mobile device is all that’s needed.
Reduced Administrative Costs
Mobility services allow landscapers – both large and small – to automate the bulk of their everyday administrative tasks. As already mentioned, they can reduce lead time in invoicing by directly capturing the costs. Similarly, as mobility solutions are employed throughout the organization, the need for paper reporting is drastically reduced. Whether it is an official form for requesting more resources, a project update request, or something else, all such intra-organizational interactions are moved to the cloud, so that the employees can access them from anywhere. The administrative team is not on the phone answering questions all day, which produces a significant boost in their productivity. This makes every other process smoother and complete projects faster.
Improved Communication & Better Workflow
Mobility solutions simplify and enrich the communication between employees. Using their convenient mobile devices, they can share real-time pictures of the project sites with their supervisors, ask for reinforcements, post requisitions for materials or more workers, and do so much more.
In large landscaping companies, managers find it difficult to manage multiple ongoing projects simultaneously. Using mobile applications, they can now do complex calculations, stay connected with the site and the office, and keep track of the budget, all in real time.
Better communication and streamlined workflows improve the efficiency of the workforce, which directly reduces the operational costs.
Better Inventory Control
Whether it is the building materials, tools, saplings, or something else, mobility solutions can keep track of all inventory levels and maintain them at their optimum levels. Inventory is one of the most important expenses for a landscaping company. High levels of inventory can lead to higher costs and losses due to surplus materials. Low levels of inventory can grind an entire project to halt, and thereby, cause losses due to downtime.
Mobility allow landscapers to keep track of live inventory and optimize its levels. When the minimum inventory levels are reached, the concerned supervisors are automatically alerted. They can then create a purchase order from anywhere using their mobile devices. Alternatively, modern mobility solutions can be automated to generate and send materials, products, or parts requests to pre-qualified suppliers as soon as the inventory levels hit a predefined minimum limit.
Such superior control over inventory ensures that there is no downtime on account of inventory shortage, cuts the downtime losses for the company and thereby, maximizes the bottom line.
Closing Thoughts
Landscaping is both a science and an art. It requires a high degree of creativity from the landscaper to create a beautiful layout and then execute it with engineering excellence. Employing mobility solutions allows them to spend less time on the administrative side of things and more on the mission-critical aspects of the business. This, not only helps them to improve their margins without hiking their prices, but also allows them to concentrate more on the output and its quality. The tricky part is having a partner that will maintain all your mobile needs for you.