First and foremost, we hope that you and your families are safe. Should you find that you are forced to operate your business semi-remotely during this period, we’d like to help you manage that transition as best you can. We’ve cherry picked 8 Knowify features that could be helpful:
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At Knowify we recognize the importance of time and efficiency. We try to implement different resources to make the job flow seamless. Do you have a job that you need to budget but can only seem to do so per hour? Do you know how much area you have and would like to calculate the material, labor, and even subcontractor prices? Then Service Templates have you covered!
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Contractors are scrambling to complete their summer projects, while also strategizing on the best ways to ensure they stay occupied once the busy season comes to a close. Here at Knowify, our team appreciates just how important a productive fall is in ensuring your business success. We’ve built our software specifically with these issues in mind, and have come up with a few tips to make sure your team stays busy (and profitable) in the coming months.
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Have you ever signed up for an app just to have it not work? It’s probably one of the most frustrating, yet easily avoidable, things we tech-savvy people can do. But, generally, it isn’t a big deal. You’ve downloaded an app on your phone that you thought was interesting or thought you might need, it doesn’t work properly, so you get rid of it and find something else. No harm, no foul.
But what happens when you’re using an app for more important tasks, like managing your finances?
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As the owner of a contracting business, you already know that managing your jobsite activities, administrative tasks, and pipeline of new jobs is a significant challenge. We at Knowify stress that doing a great job at the first two – and really showing off your professionalism – can help with the third, since happy clients can often help drive new business through referrals. But there are many other things contractors can do to source leads, and one critically overlooked sales tool in our industry (don’t cringe!) is social media. An active social media presence is an easy way to stand out from the competition, while also making your business more visible and accessible to prospective clients.
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As you probably already know, Knowify covers a wide swathe of a contractor’s day-to-day business administration activities. But it doesn’t do everything – if it’s not job related, then Knowify may not address it. Would you like to use Knowify to help you with job costing and contract management, but wish it included a lead tracking or marketing side? Or perhaps you wish you could have your Knowify activity broadcast across your communication platform (like Slack), ensuring that everyone remained up-to-date on the activities of the business. We share your vision of end-to-end business automation, with modern software tools helping you to grow efficiently and intelligently, each one passing essential information to the others to ensure that your organization is a well-oiled machine.
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Each contracting business is as unique as the jobs it takes on and the customers with whom it interacts. It was important to us at Knowify that we be able to support our many different contractors with an electronic payment solution that was as flexible as their businesses, including e-check/ACH and even credit card, when appropriate. Not all contractors should accept credit cards, and even those that do should not accept them for all jobs (see below!), BUT… there are times when offering a customer the ability to pay with a credit card can be very helpful to the contractor, and thus something we wanted to support.
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It’s an annoying truism for any trade contractor: your vendors expect you to pay on time, every time, while your customers don’t feel the same urgency when it comes to paying you. It’s doesn’t take a CPA to see the potential problem here: if vendors need to be paid now, but customers are taking their sweet time, you can run into some pretty serious cash flow problems. And, heaven forbid you’re a smaller-size contractor who finally landed a game-changing big job, those cash flow pains can actually start to threaten the health and viability of your whole business. It doesn’t have to be this way. Especially in that “big job” case, your counterparties are very likely to pay – nobody wants a mechanics lien on their property – and your contract with them leaves very little uncertainty as to what you’re owed. Recently, a number of really great services have emerged to help small contractors manage the cash-flow lumpiness of their businesses. Their services are generally quite inexpensive relative to other alternative financing sources, and are very easy to take advantage of – provided that you’re using the right sort of technology to enable them.
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As part of our December “Integration Month” series, we would like to introduce you to some of the integrations we’ve built to help our contractors connect their Knowify to useful services in a seamless way. From short-term funding to electronic payments to zapier-mediated CRM connections, we are putting a lot of effort into trying to help our users run their businesses more efficiently and get the most out of their Knowify experience. We’d like to begin the series with our very first integration, which remains our most important one: Intuit’s QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online.
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It’s become an accepted truism among economists and high-end business consultants: what you measure is what you get (see HBR Column: You are what you measure). It may sound complicated, but it’s not; the core concept is that your employees will do more of whatever you measure in terms of performance (especially if there are $-related consequences!), and less of whatever you don’t. So – what are you measuring in your business? And are you sure you’re measuring the right thing?
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