After making a large purchase, such as work order software, it is important to evaluate the product and what it does for your company. One of the best ways to determine if a major purchase was a good buy is to look at its return on investment.
But how exactly do you do this with field service software? There are actually a few ways to measure if software was a good purchase for your company.
More Jobs Scheduled – If you are capable of scheduling more jobs in a day, your work order software has a good ROI. With the ability to know exactly how long each job should take, and your techs aware of this fact, you can fit more jobs in to one day.
A software system is supposed to help you cut time wasted on paper processes, whether that be a work order or a bill. With this extra time, you should be able to fit in at least another job or two a day.
Measuring your jobs per day before and after you installed software is a quick, easy way to measure ROI.
Less Time In Office – If your office staff is spending less time hovering over paper work, you made a good investment. With field service software, you eliminate the paperwork and all data is in real time. This cuts back on the hours entering information into the system and the time it takes to decipher a tech’s handwriting.
Your office staff is also able to access customer information with a few clicks, instead of needing to call them back after searching through files or calling a technician in the field. By being able to answer customer questions almost instantly, the time in the office can be spent on actual office work, not detective work.
Want to see if your office staff has more time for other tasks? Assign them a larger project – a marketing campaign or customer survey – and see if they have time to complete it.
Bills Sent In Timely Manner – One of the largest ROI’s we have heard from our customers about their work order software is getting bills sent on time. Without work order software, the service is completed and the work order makes it back to the office (usually), but then it sits on a desk. Time runs out to review the work order and ensure all of the information is correct, and then it is time to head home for the night.
With work order software, all your data is accessible in real time and receiving the information is fairly automatic. This means you can send a bill out the same day. By getting the bill out faster, you are able to get paid faster. This also eliminates the hassle of having to chase down the paperwork you need to bill your customers.
Want to measure the ROI? Track the percent of bills a week or two weeks or a month overdue. If it’s less than before software, you’ve seen a return on your investment in the form of cash flow.
Increase In Revenue – If all of the above is occurring, you should also be increasing revenue. More jobs mixed with an elimination of lost work order or bills, means more money should be coming in, at an efficient rate. Although an increase (or decrease) in revenue can’t always be easily attributed to software, it’s a good bet that if your revenue suddenly jumps after installing work order software, that the software is to blame.
It can be difficult to measure how successful a process is working for your business. Most of the time small business owners are too focused on making it through the day to day to focus their attention on how their systems are benefiting their company. Using the above examples are just some of the ways you can measure the return on investment your work order software provides your business.
Once it’s determined that your software is benefiting your company, what else can be improved to bring in more revenue for your business? What about your website? Many times a site is put up and then forgotten about. Check out the 6 Requirements for a Website that Sells to find out how you can improve the ROI of your website!