A construction project management tool is a powerful addition to your business. This tool is made even more beneficial to your business by integrating it with your accounting software to create a single point of entry for data, attain more financial visibility, and get more out of your payroll management.
Stop double-entry between your systems
Because your business uses construction software you understand the benefits of handling all your operations, communications, and data in one online platform. Yet by not integrating with your accounting system you are still making your team enter financial data twice, spending time and resources jumping between two programs when they could be automatically sending information back and forth.
For example, by not integrating your construction system with your accounting system, trying to organize and track your real-time project costs resembles the following scenario. First, your team will need to pull up all of your bills paid in your accounting system. Then your team will have to compare those bills to your estimate to identify costs paid, and costs left outstanding. Find any discrepancies or missing items between the two reports? Time to double-check your math to see if you missed anything, copied a number wrong, or you may just decide to cut your losses, eat the additional costs, and move on. Not only does your company miss out on the productivity gains of incorporating the two systems but you open yourself up to a human error in copying over data from one system to another which could turn out to be even more costly.
Now imagine what a fully integrated system looks like. Your construction software serves as a single point of entry to data, including financial data. Because of this, your initial estimate serves as the cornerstone of your project and all of that information gets pushed to your accounting system creating a one-to-one connection between the two systems and eliminating the need to reconcile the two at a later date. With the two systems operating together you get the advantages of both without having to try to operate both systems at the same time.
For instance, you perform your day-to-day work in your construction software and once a task reaches a point where a cash dispersal or intake is necessary, you can push and pull the appropriate information to your accounting system. No need to re-enter data that already exists or track down and double-check the information. All of your project information that has accumulated to a bill or invoice is already together in your construction software and the information your bookkeeper needs is then pushed onto your accounting system. This also creates a process where once something is finally pushed to your bookkeeper, they know that the work has been verified and the bill or invoice is ready to be sent.
Attain more financial visibility
As mentioned above, tracking real-time costs between two disparate systems is challenging. Without a dedicated resource to constantly reconcile your accounting and project management systems, your business ends up in a state of limbo hoping all of your receipts add up at the end of the day to be equal or less than your projections. Additionally, your team’s access or knowledge of your accounting system may be limited. Meaning even if a team member other than your bookkeeper has the ability to access your accounting system to check costs they may not have the working knowledge to accomplish the task.
After your construction estimate, your budget is the backbone of your project management and the sole deciding factor in project profitability. Integrating your accounting and construction management systems allows you to give your entire team the visibility to see projected and actual costs in real-time. This financial enablement means you and your team can track profit margins from the beginning to the end of a project and thus quickly make adjustments when necessary to preserve profitability.
Often as projects close out teams are shifting resources to begin their next project. In this transition, many teams don’t have the bandwidth to sit down and debrief on project learnings, especially when it comes to cost miscalculations. By tracking costs in real-time and not waiting until every check has been sent, your team can see and acknowledge where your estimate or budget went astray to make the adjustments necessary for your next project.
Save time and get more out of your payroll management
Many construction software solutions offer a time clock management feature to help track, view, and report out on employee activity. While these features are powerful ways to help save time in payroll management, integrating with your accounting software can help multiply these returns with additional benefits. For example, when employees clock in and out using your construction software they can log their hours worked, activities worked, type of hours worked, and more. These fields can be synced with your accounting system to eliminate the need for a bookkeeper to sort through spreadsheets, or worse stacks of paper timesheets, to determine overtime hours or attribute labor costs to project cost lines. These labor costs can then also be reflected in up-to-date costs on your budget to accurately see the latest job costs in your construction software. Incorporating your construction and accounting systems can turn your time clock management from a cumbersome and time-consuming process into a streamlined and insightful process.
The benefits your company sees from using construction project management software will multiply by integrating it with your accounting software. Take the next step in pushing your business forward by letting your accounting and construction systems work together. Looking for more information? Learn about CoConstruct’s construction accounting integration here or if you are a current CoCosntruct customer see how your team can integrate with QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop.
