Company Utilizes Integrated Solution To Improve Key Processes
California residential design/build company expects to reduce 8-month payroll costs by $40,000!
Harrell Remodeling is a highly successful residential design/build construction company in Mountain View, California, whose business processes needed an upgrade. Until recently, the company had been relying on a variety of traditional business tools, such as spreadsheets and fax machines, to manage key business processes, including the preparation and collection of time sheets, tracking job costs, managing payroll, and communicating with field staff.
The company is also a “green” business and wanted to reduce its paper usage. “We were struggling with our manual business systems and processes,” said Susan Pines, Accounting Manager at Harrell. “We needed a system for mobile worker management and payroll processing that worked seamlessly together, from hours and jobs performed through getting people paid.”
The Harrell Design Center must account for both field and office worker’s time (by project), requiring a solution able to address both groups. Susan worked with the sales staff at mJobTime to come up with an innovative resolution to the problem:Xora’s GPS TimeTrack application, which runs on Sprint/Verizon devices, is used to record time sheet and job status information for 25 carpenters throughout the day. Workers use fields within drop down menus to enter job, cost codes and phase codes.
Back at the office, the Design Center staff has access to web-based maps and business reports generated by GPS TimeTrack that detail the location and activities of field staff in real-time. Each day, time data is downloaded from Xora into mJob-Time where it can be reviewed, edited and approved before being sent to their Master Builder accounting and payroll system. Meanwhile, designers and administrative staff also use the mJobTime software to record their time by client and activity with the ability to add notes for billing clients. Once the time data for both groups has been approved, it can all be uploaded to Master Builder from mJobTime with a single click. “For a growing company like ours, the combination of Xora and mJobTime has proven to be a winning option!”
The results have been impressive:
- Less time is wasted traveling to and from the office; as much as 12 additional carpenter hours are available each week to service clients
- Payroll approval and review processes are more accurate and now take 1/3 the time
- An estimated net savings of approximately $40,000 in 2007
