6 Ways to Save Money by Taking Your Work Order Forms Online
- September 15, 2017
- By: Vonigo
Still using paper-based work orders? Say it ain’t so. The time to take your work order forms online is now. Not because of it what it will cost, but because of how much it will save.
For services companies, time saved is money saved, while wasted time cuts into your profit margins. When you can accurately schedule more jobs, you’ll earn more — simple as that.
Here’s a list of five ways that taking your work order forms online will save you money.
1. Eliminate Paperwork
The old way was to have stacks of work orders at your dispatch desk, with corresponding copies in the trucks of the crews scheduled to do the jobs. Unless they check in after each job is complete, you’re in the dark as to their progress through the day.
Now, all of your jobs can be plotted on a schedule that is purpose-built for your business and accessible from anywhere. You can have complete visibility into your crews, and can even assign jobs to their schedule throughout the day without disruptive phone calls or added paperwork. Your company can be one step closer to going paperless.
Bonus benefit: You’ll improve the image of your company in the eyes of your customers. Seeing your techs managing their jobs, scheduling and billing through their mobile device will leave a better impression of professionalism than paper-based work orders and invoices.
2. Give the Customer Control with Online Booking
Have your work orders created directly by customers, and save even more time.
Take some of the admin work off of your office staff’s plate while giving the customer greater convenience, with online booking. More customers are choosing to book appointments online, bypassing the need for phone calls and voice messages.
With online booking, you give your customers the ability to book appointments themselves based on your availability, and they automatically become work orders in your schedule.
3. Make Changes “on the Fly”
Cancellations, new bookings, and change requests from customers. They can all have serious implications to the scheduling of your day, and all are bound to happen at one time or another.
Work order software can help to prevent cancellations (by sending confirmation messages to customers) and makes changes easy. If a customer requests a change or a tech in the field needs to make an adjustment to the work schedule due to unforeseen circumstances, the process can be quite painless. Either by your admin team in the office or by your techs in the field, changes to the schedule can be made easily and instantly with your work order forms online.
4. Make Fewer Mistakes
Remember when you had to decipher the handwriting on the carbon copy of a work order? It wasn’t that long ago that the yellow copy of a triplicate form was the bane of the existence of field teams.
Now, work orders details are always legible. Not only that, but you can map your way directly to the call. And under-appreciated features like auto-fill of addresses can prevent mistakes from happening at the source as well.
5. Get Paid Faster
When your work order forms are online, a technician in the field can check out of the job as soon as they are done, and trigger the sending of the final invoice immediately.
Not only can this process save time for sending invoices in a more timely fashion, but it can get you paid faster too. When the customer receives an emailed invoice with a link to pay online, the time to receipt of payment can be greatly reduced. You can even receive payment before the crew has even left the site!
6. Constantly Get Better
In addition to the five ways listed above, you can save even more time by constantly improving. When your work order forms are digital and your schedule is tracked online with work order software, every metric measured. That which you measure you can also improve upon.
At a glance, you can see the drive time, work time and jobs count for your crews. In fact, you can track more than 60 different metrics, and the find ways to improve upon each. You could be wasting time now, by not having a system like this in place already.
Want to learn more about how work order software can help you boost your revenues and profits? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.