6 Benefits of Saying Goodbye to the Paper Work Order Form

Still using paper? There’s a better way to complete a work order form, and the benefits are many. Read on to learn all the ways that ditching the paper in favor of software can benefit your business, and enable it to grow.

Eliminate Inefficiencies in Your Work Order Form Process

With a paper-based work order form system, you rely on a dispatcher to calculate the routing and scheduling of a tech’s day. Any changes that happen during the day or while the job is happening have to be communicated back-and-forth between the tech and the office, costing precious time.

With work order software, your day’s jobs are plotted on a digital calendar, sorted by tech, geography, special skills or other criteria. Your entire team can get an instant view of the day’s jobs, and filter to view only the ones that are relevant to them. Best of all, your techs are free to focus on completing jobs and shuffling paperwork.

Improve Your Company Image

We’ve reached a point in time when using a paper-based work order system makes you look unprofessional when compared to the competition. Paperwork orders have a greater environmental impact and hard costs, but the expense to your business is much greater than that.

The impression that work order software makes with a customer is vastly superior to that of paper-based work orders. Your jobs and arrival times can be confirmed via email, providing a better overall customer experience. Your tech can discreetly check in and out of the job on their smartphone, and even trigger an invoice when the job is done.

They can also avoid wasted time (and leaving a bad impression) by not having to make phone calls throughout the day to communicate changes to the daily schedule with the office. Changes within your work order software are possible instantly, by either admin staff or techs. These changes can have little-to-no interruption while techs are on site at your customer’s home.

Make Fewer Mistakes

Paper gets wet. It blows in the breeze or falls behind the seat of the truck. Handwritten addresses can have errors and be hard to read. Mid-day changes can upset the timing of a tech’s day if you miss a work order due to inaccurate filing or record-keeping.

Software, on the other hand, never forgets. Features that we all now take for granted, like autocorrect and autocomplete, save countless errors from happening, especially when entering address information. Accurate and complete job information is readily accessible, and everyone has access.

Track Your Work with Accurate Records

Customer relationships matter. Perhaps you cannot have your techs get personally familiar with customers. Still, good record-keeping can make them familiar with the customer’s history.

Work order software can give you an accurate picture of a customer’s previous service history. It can track the warranty or half-life of any hardware that your business sold or installed. It can alert you when a customer qualifies for volume discounts or other incentives. Above all, it can help provide a consistency of service that will turn new customers into repeat customers.

Keep Pricing Consistent

Itemized pricing for your services makes it a breeze to estimate or quote on jobs. Your work order software can make the calculations for you. You can calculate the cost of a job based on timing, services, parts, and more. You’ll also eliminate more potential errors from happening.

Improve as You Go

A paper-based work order form can’t tell you much about your team’s performance after the fact. It would take a lot of math to determine the travel time, time per job, revenue per job, revenue per tech, or any other metric that is important to your business. With work order software, you can track the performance of all of these (in fact, you can track over 60 different metrics) and find ways to constantly improve.

Those improvements, however minor, can add up over time and really add to your profitability. Find better ways to route your travel between jobs. Assign more jobs to teams that perform faster. Identify your top and weakest performing techs or teams, and either reward them or train to fix inefficiencies. You need an accurate picture of your company’s performance. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses can be the key ingredient to getting an edge over your competition.

Interested to learn how you can put a software-based work order form system in place in your business? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.