Streamlining Your Restoration Projects: How Restoration Software Can Help You Save Time and Money

Regardless of the business size, operational costs and overhead always affect profitability. To maintain profit margins, a restoration contractor must control expenditures without sacrificing the quality of their work. Reducing costs may involve looking at several factors that affect their bottom line, including managing inventory, curbing labor costs, and ensuring jobs get done expediently. Knowing which tasks can be optimized can help a restoration company boost its profits.

On any restoration job, guiding the project to completion involves careful management. Streamlining each step in the process speeds up the time it takes to complete it, which translates into greater profitability. Today’s technology offers many tools for automating various mundane tasks that help optimize the entire property restoration process. Software platforms geared towards restoration companies help project managers reduce errors, enhance stakeholder communication, and effectively utilize data to improve overall performance.

Streamlining Project Management with Property Restoration Software

Restoration project management isn’t simple. Like any other type of construction, restoration work requires teams to effectively schedule their time and stay within a specific budget while ensuring the quality of their work and maintaining a safe environment for employees or subcontractors. Additionally, efficient use of resources will improve a restoration company’s profits. This includes how a project manager manages time, which enhances profits and improves customer satisfaction.

Features in Property Restoration Software That Help Contractors Save Time

Automating tasks once done manually saves time, and this is one area in which modern property restoration software excels, making them more manageable. When a project manager works to restore a property, restoration software helps make this process simpler. This software must have specific features that enable a restoration company to manage its inventory while also tracking labor costs and progress on a job.

To save contractors time, there are three features property restoration software must have: 

• Automatic inventory management: While a smaller restoration contractor can manage their business with a simple spreadsheet program or other basic software application, they won’t be able to properly maintain their inventory. Property restoration software that helps project managers track their valuable equipment, construction materials, and other supplies in real time helps project managers and their teams manage their time more efficiently. Ensuring teams have all the proper equipment and supplies to do their job will help reduce costs.
• Automatically logging technician hours: One of the most important aspects of any restoration project involves determining the exact labor costs of a job. Any property restoration software must have a sufficiently robust timeclock application that won’t go offline when team members need to clock in and out. Cloud-based platforms are best for this, making everything accessible in real-time while backing up data to track labor hours better spent on a specific project. 
• Tracking progress in real-time: Keeping progress on any worksite is an important part of any restoration project. If data isn’t current, a project manager isn’t getting an accurate picture of the progress being made. This, in turn, could lead to making decisions based on insufficient information, leading to inefficiency and additional costs. A good property restoration software platform enables contractors to generate real-time data-driven reports , enabling better decision-making.

Along with these three features, it’s important to understand other ways in which property restoration software can help cut costs.

How Property Restoration Software Helps Cut Costs

Property restoration software has the potential to reduce errors, enhance communications, and utilize data in ways that help cut contractors’ costs and improve profits. Much of this is due to the automated features mentioned above, but any software platform considered by restoration companies should offer certain benefits that increase profitability, either directly or indirectly.

Three ways in which restoration contractors can use software to cut costs include: 

• Reducing errors: Property restoration software that can identify the extent of water damage will help improve a contractor’s ability to estimate properly to help avoid customer disputes. Most restoration software will also allow contractors to store essential documents digitally to reduce the chance of misplacing them or losing valuable information. Additionally, inputting data or uploading photos of a job site more accurately from a mobile device saves time while reducing the chance of an estimate being off.
• Enhancing communication: Every business relies on communication to some extent, but it’s essential for companies that handle property restoration. Software that enhances communications with stakeholders like insurance companies, office staff, field teams, suppliers, subcontractors, and customers is essential. A platform that can provide easy communication through various channels while recording these communications will help contractors develop the relationships they need to get referral sales and repeat business.
• Improving management and analysis of data: Cloud-based property restoration platforms offer businesses a means to store almost unlimited data. In property restoration, software should be able to use this data to contribute to better decision-making, such as aiding marketing campaigns by showing where the most lucrative markets are or enabling contractors to gauge various teams’ performance. Data analytics tools should thus be part of any restoration software platform to enable data-driven decisions.

To get the most out of a property restoration software platform, however, it’s important to choose the right partner.

Engaging an Experienced Partner

It’s important when implementing new property restoration software that they have both experience in the industry and an intimate understanding of a customer’s needs, now and into the future. As technology keeps evolving, finding a partner driven to keep up with these changes is important. Rather than just purchasing software, many businesses – including restoration companies – find it easier and more efficient to partner with a software provider.

Businesses that purchase software without a partnership arrangement often find many of these tools too difficult to use, and the company then uses just a fraction of the software’s capabilities. The best third-party property restoration software vendors will assist with recommendations and often can propose innovative solutions that use their technology. Finding the right tech partner– like Albi–will help improve business performance and help a contractor stand out from their competition.

Among other things, Albi offers the following capabilities: 

• Create PDF reports in real-time, including reports with photos that record drying progression.
• Gather and evaluate moisture readings over time.
• Make inventory lists for equipment, vehicles, and other valuable assets and their current locations.
• Tag photos to classify and organize them, making searches easier.
• Take an indefinite number of photos immediately, including within chambers.
• Upload an unrestricted number of photos from a smartphone or other mobile device.

Let Albi be your partner in property restoration, the software for restoration contractors made by restoration contractors. To learn more about Albi and how it can help save your company time and money, schedule a demo today.