How Stewart Painting got real-time job costingwithout building a sheet by hand
Stewart Painting's job costs now update themselves every workday. Instead of finding out two or three months later that a job lost money, the owners see where every active job stands the next morning.
- Industry
- Residential and commercial painting
- Location
- Cape Cod, Massachusetts
- Built on
- QuickBooks Time, QuickBooks, Smartsheet, Google Sheets
- Projects
- Job costing, crew skills directory
- Time to first use
- 30 days from kickoff
Estimated from a small margin gain on every job plus 100+ office hours a month at $30 an hour. Results depend on your business.
“Sheldon and I were actually doing it yesterday, looking at things and we're saying, oh, this is what we've been waiting five years to be able to do.”
The problem
Job costing
Stewart's job cost sheets were built by hand, one job at a time, and the numbers ran months behind. By the time the owners learned a job had lost money, it was long finished, and crew leaders couldn't see what had been spent on their own jobs.
“Job costing is three months behind.”
“Even if a crew leader today wanted to know how much material was purchased for his job, he can't.”
Crew skills directory
Stewart's field manager puts dozens of painters on crews, and the only record of who could do what lived in each painter's training packet, opened one at a time. Matching a skill to a job, like reglazing windows on an old house, meant calling around to crew leaders.
What we built
Job costing
- Job cost sheets that build and update themselves, in the format the office already used.
- A short daily email that flags only what needs a person.
- An owner scoreboard showing how every crew and job is tracking against goal.
Crew skills directory
- A crew skills directory in Smartsheet, built from the training packets the team already keeps.
- One row per painter with their strong skills and the skills they're still learning, plus a view by skill showing who can do it and who is learning it.
- It refreshes every Monday, so a new rating shows up without anyone retyping it.
- Now whenever skilled labor is needed, the team can assign the right person to the right job within minutes.
Results
Job costing
- The office stopped building job cost sheets by hand about four weeks after kickoff, and the person who built them moved on to finance work.
- 100+ hours a month of office time back.
- Overruns now show up while the job is still running, not months later.
Crew skills directory
- Every painter's skills in one filterable view, refreshed every Monday.
“Making it easily accessible and making it so that it's real-time really is a game-changer for us.”
“You guys have really gotten this to us quicker than we expected, to be honest.”
Common questions
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