As a contracting business owner, you must know your company's current and past performance. Comparing leads, current job statuses, contracts, and money to year-over-year or month-over-month historical data show growth or stagnation. You can see your performance with a contracting company CRM.

Finding the appropriate software for your company may be complicated—there are many possibilities, and none are guaranteed to be the silver bullet. When undertaking research, business owners should examine what they need or want to see when thinking about their roofing company's overall performance and how a CRM may give that perspective.

Overview of Finances

CRMs that integrate with accounting software like Quickbooks may immediately show your company's financial success. Comparing individual sales numbers, costs, material orders, outstanding contracts, and commissions creates an easy-to-digest dashboard for owners who want to know where their money is.

Archival Data

A firm that has been established for a few years will have records—previous employment, insurance documents, material orders—that need to be filed and maintained so staff can reference them later. For example, a project manager is at a site, and the client remembers work done during a prior storm. Dealing with years of stored documentation might be a logistical headache.

The PM would have to contact the office, ask an office staff member to find the prior files and reference the work, then communicate that information to them. If your personnel is busy or can't find the files, this might take hours.

Your field employees may reference prior work, papers, images, contracts, and resources by calling up the customer's file in a contracting firm CRM.

Personalization benefits from quick archive retrieval. Before estimating, a salesperson might use this. They may also allude to prior teams' remarks, such as if the client noted requiring new siding or gutter repair "next time."

This wouldn't be doable with office paper documents.

>>Related post: Roofing Contractors Increasingly Relying on Technology in Wake of Coronavirus Outbreak

Simpler Employee Onboarding

During peak production, roofing firms may engage seasonal, specialist trade, or extra workers. Using a simple software tool with pre-built templates assures that these new hires are following your company's policy and making records that can be preserved.

Intuitive software reduces errors and helps new hires get up to speed fast.

Tech Trends & Tools

Roofers' and outside contractors' demands and equipment evolve, so technology does too. Integrations make work easier.

Instead of maintaining several applications or accounts for all the features you need, software that offers integrations within a single application means less toggling back and forth—ordering roofing measurements that immediately populate estimates, photos taken, annotated, shared, and stored directly in job files—these features save you time and money in the long run.

Tech needs upgrading. Contracting company CRMs hosted and managed by developers instead of your office employees means fewer outages, frequent upgrades, and dedicated customer support.

>>Related post: How to Assess Your Roofing Technology to Increase Profitability

Contractor CRM

CRMs, company management software, or whatever you want to call them, are not new technologies. Still, the value they bring and the additional capabilities they provide may assist roofing business owners in transitioning from paper and Excel to a fully digital world.