As a young construction contractor, it’s important to have the right tools to make your business profitable. An app for contractors to bid on jobs is a great starting point. But if you want to make a profit, that’s not enough. You also need job costing features to track your expenses and know your profitability. In this article, we’ll explore why this is important and how it can help you succeed in the competitive world of construction.
First, let’s talk about bidding on jobs. When you’re bidding on a project, you need to have accurate information about the costs involved. This includes the cost of materials, labor, equipment, and any other expenses you may incur. Without this information, you risk underbidding and losing money on the job, or overbidding and losing the project to a competitor. An app that helps you calculate these costs and create accurate bids is essential for success in the construction industry.
But bidding on a job is only the first step. Once you’ve won the project, you need to track your expenses to ensure that you’re staying within budget and making a profit. This is where job costing features come in. Job costing allows you to track your expenses for each project and compare them to the estimated costs in your bid. This helps you identify any areas where you may be overspending and make adjustments to stay on track.
Job costing also helps you calculate your profitability for each project. By tracking your expenses and comparing them to your revenue, you can see how much profit you’re making on each job. This information is essential for making strategic decisions about your business, such as which types of projects to focus on or which expenses to cut back on.
In addition to tracking expenses, job costing can also help you identify areas where you can improve your efficiency and profitability. For example, you may notice that certain types of projects are consistently more profitable than others, or that certain subcontractors are more expensive than others. By analyzing this data, you can make changes to your business practices to improve your profitability over time.
So, what should you look for in an app for contractors to bid on jobs?
- It should be easy to use.
- It should create a professional quality job bid.
- It should greatly speed up the process of bidding jobs.
- It should allow you to track costs on a line item basis.
- It should work on mobile devices for recording expenses from the field.
- It should have cost reporting.
- The app should be affordable.
We recommend ProfitDig. We designed it to be easy and quick for contractors to get up-to-speed. You have to put in some time initially to set up your bid items that comprise your jobs. Job bids can be cloned multiple times until you have it just right, or to use as a template for other jobs. Once a bid is set up and awarded, you can record your expenses on a line-by-line basis. At the end of the job, you will know EXACTLY where you made money on the job and where you lost money. That knowledge will help you improve your job bidding and MAKE MORE MONEY!
If you have questions, just get in touch with us. You can even have a phone call with ProfitDig co-founder, highly skilled Project Manager, Jeff Spencer.