Name: Take Control of Your Construction Accounting with Deltek ComputerEase
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T19:31:16.018Z
Duration: 53 min 28 s
Description: Take Control of Your Construction Accounting with Deltek ComputerEase

Transcript for "Take Control of Your Construction Accounting with Deltek ComputerEase": Hi. Good afternoon to everyone or good morning depending on where you're joining us from, and welcome to today's webinar. Hi. Good afternoon or good morning, depending on what time zone you're joining us joining us from. And welcome to today's webinar. Today's topic, take control of your construction accounting with Deltek Computerese. Couple quick housekeeping notes before we get started. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. The audio for today's presentation is streamed through your computers. There's no dial in, so please make sure the volume is turned up. You can download the presentation slides and any additional resources in the resource tab. Please note that you would get a link to an on demand recording within twenty four hours after today's webinar ends. So please feel free to watch it back or share with anybody else that may benefit from today's content. If have any questions at all, please type them into the q and a box. As we go throughout the presentation, we'll get to as many as we can at the end of the presentation. And if we don't get to, we'll follow-up individually offline. So as I mentioned, today's topic is take control of your construction accounting with Deltek ComputeEase. Quick introduction. I am John Mivers, vice president general manager here at Deltek ComputeEase. I have over thirty five years of experience working in the construction industry. Started my career in construction, working for a large mechanical contractor, held various roles during my career there, including controller. Worked in the industry for over ten years, and I've spent the last now twenty five, almost thirty years serving the over 6,000 contractors nationwide as the leader of Deltek Computers. A lot of my role here today is focused on equipping contractors with the tools they need to manage profitability, drive growth, and meet the ever changing construction requirements. I'm gonna launch a quick polling question here. I would like to know what your current ERP solution is. Are you using Deltek Computaries? Are you using Foundation? Maybe you're using Jonas, QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, or other. We'll leave that open for about thirty seconds or so. Give everybody a chance to select the appropriate choice and then we'll go ahead and jump in, share the results and continue on with the presentation. Give it maybe another ten seconds or so. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll. We'll take a look at the results. So got a good number of you on already existing Computers customers. We certainly thank you and appreciate your business. We got a number from QuickBooks, a number on Sage, and a number using other solutions as well. So thank you for that. And we'll go ahead and move on throughout the presentation here. So I think we would all agree projecting construction profits is challenging. We have thin margins. You know, it's not unheard of to have margins in the in the low single digits, mid single digit range. You know, we a lot of accounting is still done and job costing and other work is still done on spreadsheets, you know, which can make things, you know, can make things very complicated to do. And, you know, a lot of jobs, come in over budget. You know, just 31% of jobs finished within 10% of their original budget. So, obviously, managing job cost, having a good job cost accounting system is critical in our industry. You know, generic accounting tools make life harder. There there and that's you know, there are generic accounting solutions such as QuickBooks as an example. You know, they're gonna have very limited, if, you know, job cost, if any. Makes it very difficult to have a good have good visibility into your profit margins. They don't have the construction billing tools and formats that are required, which makes billing slow and complicated. And they don't you know, they have a very difficult time managing construction payroll. Payroll is difficult no matter what kind of business you're in. But in construction, we know how difficult payroll can be. From managing union payroll to, you know, a a prevailing wage, producing certified payroll payroll reports, handling the proper tax withholding based on where the job is located can all be very complicated. And then accurately and in real time, getting the cost visible on the jobs, the actual job cost, the actual labor cost, the true labor cost. So these are things that are really difficult in a generic accounting solution. Like, you know, I think the the the best way to look at it is, you know, you think of a a system like a QuickBooks and job cost if at best is an afterthought. And a system like ComputeEase that was built specifically for the construction industry, it's at the center of what we do. It's at the heart of what we do. And because we we understand how important that is to you, the contractor. You know, what does great construction accounting software look like? You know, we're able to produce whip whip schedule, work in progress report. It gives you clear visibility into not only where you're at, but where you're going. What what, you know, what your original profit was estimated to be and what your current profit is projected to be. That's the whole, you know, one of the main functions on the in the WIP reporting. And we'll take a look at some examples in computers here in a few minutes. Certainly manages and tracks you over under billing and makes the you know, and and, you know, allows you to make those financial adjustments, which is crucial in our industry. You know, it it allows you to to do quick and easy billing on the correct form, the correct format, whether you're doing a progress billing on, say, the AIA g seven zero two, seven zero three, or something similar. Maybe you're doing a unit billing. Maybe you're doing DOT work and you get paid by the unit. Maybe you're doing time and material time and material or cost plus billing. Those all require unique forms and we need to be able to, you know, to bill correctly and on the right form. Then we have built in compliance tools that make, you know, payroll become pain free. Payroll can be very painful, very complex, very, very difficult. But if you have the right tools, we can take the pain out of that. And that's something that we can do with a solution like Computerese. You know, with with, you know, with our solution, with the Computerese solution, you know, you're gonna get real time job costing. It'll allow you to make better decisions for your business. You're gonna be proactive and not reactive. You're gonna see where you're going based on where you're at. You're gonna get a clear view of your profits, not not only after the job is over, but while the job is going on, where are you projected to land? And, you know, I wanna know something that's that's, you know, projected to go, you know, over budget before I get there. I don't wanna wait until I'm over budget and then and then be told that, oh, I've already spent more than the budget. I should be able to see that. I should have visibility into that because if I've already spent half the budget but only done 40% of the work, at that same pace, I will go over budget. You know, we need to make sure that we're you know, our billing is accurate. It's on time. It's on the right form. And certainly, we're gonna take the pain out of payroll. You know, there's no reason the payroll needs to be as complicated and painful as it can be for some if you have the right tool and the right system. You know, the our platform powers success at every stage of the project life side cycle. It's engineered for those outcomes. It's gonna help us win the job, you know, plan the job, execute the job, and analyze. So, you know, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna capture opportunities and we're gonna win. We're gonna win new work. We're gonna plan and be ready to execute the work once it starts. We're gonna execute the work, produce the reports, produce the billings, generate payroll, all the things that happened during the execution. And then finally, we're gonna analyze both during the life cycle of the job and then certainly post, you know, the completion as well. So really, you know, a solution engineered to handle the entire project life cycle. It's it it really with with the solution between our built in AI, between our field apps, mean, we're gonna and we'll talk about some of this stuff here in just a little bit. You know, we need to be able to, you know, use automation today. We need to take advantage of all the technology that exist today. You know, the apps help us communicate between the field and the office. I mean, that's really part that really is what we do. And then certainly, just our our native architecture and our cloud offering, we're gonna we're gonna make sure you you that you're compliant, you're in control, you have access to your to your data from anywhere at any time, the data is secure. And then certainly all the services and consulting and that come along with the great solutions here at Delta Computerease. Computerease is at the core of the platform. It's really what makes things run for the contractor. We're gonna do accounting, we're gonna do job costs, and we're gonna help you manage inventory. We're gonna collect time and expense and daily field reports in the field, gonna give you clear visibility into your business with interactive dashboards, state of the art industry reporting, such as generating the the generation of the work in progress schedule. Contractor, you know, my opinion, we can't we can't do without that today. It's it's a critical piece of our business. And certainly gonna help us schedule jobs, allocate resources, schedule the resources, and manage all the documentation flow that's required throughout the life cycle of a construction job. Get real time job costing and, you know, with the the definition of real time has changed as technology is advanced. It used to be, and I, you know, gave my background how long I've been doing this. It used to be real time meant after we gathered time because for a lot of us, the most, you know, expensive thing is our is our labor cost. And it's really the thing that can that that has the it it can vary. And and the and the thing that is the is the riskiest is is going over on the labor budget. And before technology had advanced to where it is today, we would gather the time at the end of the week or maybe on Monday for the week prior. We would then spend a day or two entering it, processing it, running payroll, and then we would post payroll. And when we post the payroll, job cost would then be updated. So it would be updated the middle of this week and and that and with time that started the beginning of last week. So we could be a week and a half, ten days behind real time. Where today, with the tools and technology we have today, we can enter time in the field every day. Immediately, it's job cost. We're not we're still not gonna run payroll till next week, but that time, those hours, that committed cost is reflected on the job today. You know, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna use our work in progress schedule to to track the where the job is and where it's going. We'll see examples of that here in a minute. And certainly, having a clear line of sight to your committed cost is critical in our industry. When I write a purchase order, I write a purchase order against a $10,000 line item. I have a budget of $10,000 for material on a particular line item on a job. I write a purchase order for 9,500. If I don't commit that purchase order against that $10,000 budget, I could look at that and say, why? I still have $10,000 to spend. I haven't spent any of my budget yet. When in reality, I've committed to spend 95% of that. I've already committed to spend 9,500 of the 10,000, But I but if I don't see that commitment, I'm not gonna have, you know, clear visibility into that. You know, we need to make billing accurate every time, but we don't whether it's AIA, unit billing, time and material, we you need to make sure we're billing accurately and on the right form. We need to manage retainage. And we need to make sure that, you know, we're getting, once again, all the other costs in addition to the labor costs which we talked about. But we need to get other costs from the field as well. We need to get expenses in. We need to make it easy to enter invoices, you know, using, you know, technology like ICR to, you know, to interpret the and and read the invoice or, you know, our field app to, you know, scan the receipt and be intelligent enough to to figure out, you know, who the vendor is, you know, potentially what job it goes to, etcetera. So these are all things that we need to do and take advantage of the the solutions that we have. Taking the pain out of construction payroll, and I know we've said this a time or two already, but it is critical that we do this. I mean, when you need to have a system that understands construction payroll. We can maintain full multi local, multi state tax compliance issues. If you're a contractor working in multiple states or in multiple states and potentially multiple local municipalities that also have payroll withholding requirements within those states. It's your responsibility as the employer to make sure that the payroll taxes are withheld properly and the job can drive all that. The work location drives the payroll taxes we need to withhold. Also drives the pay rates. Whether you're union or nonunion contractor, a lot of times on a especially on on public work where you're you know, you have to follow prevailing wage laws, the type of work I'm doing could could drive the pay rate. So you have not only a, you know, a nonunion contractor and maybe I have an employee and one day I'm working on a non prevailing wage job and the next day I'm on a prevailing wage job, which requires me to pay that employee a different rate. Could also be while I'm on that prevailing wage job, maybe in the morning, I was up on a piece of equipment, so I had to be paid the operator rate. And in the afternoon, I was down on the ground. I was I was paid the laborer rate. So you could have one employee in the same day working on the same job, and I could be required to pay them different rates. Certainly working on different jobs, I could be required to pay them different rates. And certainly working on different jobs, I could be required to withhold different payroll tax taxes based on the location of the job. So with the right system, all that becomes very easy to do. So with that, I am gonna go ahead and jump over. We're gonna use computer ease to see some examples of what we're gonna see here. So let me go ahead and go over and I'm gonna share my screen. And you should now be seeing my Computerese screen. So, yep, they bring that up. So great. So we're gonna take a look at, like I said, for those of you that use Computerese already, some of this will look familiar. For those of you that don't, I'm gonna use this kind of as an example and, you know, show you what I think, you know, best in class job cost accounting software should be able to do for you. And this allows you to take control. And I guess it you know, that's kind of the, you know, the theme with today's topic is really to take control of your business and you really need the right system to do that. So I'm gonna start with the with the job center or job dashboard. Because as I mentioned, you know, with with ComputeEase, the job is at the center of everything we do. So, when I go into to the job dashboard, it's gonna give me one place to go and see everything about this particular job. So I can see the original contract, the approved change orders, the current contract, the estimated cost, the projected cost. We'll talk about cost projections here in a minute when we focus a little bit more on the work in progress schedule. The cost to date, the billings to date. If I want more information, I can drill down on the cost to date. Now I can see it broken out by activity. And I could see this for, you know, every individual is broken out. And these would all be, you know, specific to your is, you know, broken out. I'm gonna see the actual versus estimated cost on each item. The actual versus estimated hours. If I want more detail, I can drill down into the specific item and now I see every detailed labor, materials, subcontract, equipment cost that was allocated charged against that particular job and that particular activity on that job. You know, I can see the billings to date. I can drill down and see a list of all my pay applications. You know, maybe I wanna see what was on pay app 21. I can drill right down to the progress billing schedule using the G702, G703 format, but I'm able to see that. I'm able to to drill right down and take a look at the actual pay request itself. So this is, you know, bringing take job. You know, I wanna see you know, we saw here we had a $106,000 in approved change orders. I could click on the change order tab. I could see a detailed breakdown of the 106 k in change orders. But notice I'm also seeing pending change orders, rejected change orders. I need to track the change orders, only after the fact when they're approved, but I need I should be tracking them from the time they are initiated. I don't want that change order to fall through the cracks. In a lot of cases, we've started doing work before we actually get the signed change order. So I need to make sure that I have clear visibility into that. We looked at the the breakdown by cost code. Maybe I just wanna see a simple breakdown. Labor, overtime, burden, fringes, materials, subcontract, equipment, etcetera. Very simple to to to kind of flip to that summary view from the more detailed view. Committed cost. We talked about the importance of commitments. On this particular job, I have almost 39 k in outstanding commitments. I could then drill down on the PO detail, see a list of all of my open purchase orders. I could drill down on the subcontract detail, see the status of all all of my subcontracts. But when I write that purchase order or write that subcontract agreement, it's going to be committed to the job. And then I'm gonna track everything against that from, you know, from that point forward. You you know, this year, we got some really good indicators here. Our projected profit is less than what we had originally projected. We were originally projecting 52,000 in profit and now we're down to 7,000. I can drill down and see, and we'll look at this when we talk a little bit more about the WIP. But I can see, you know, based on projections, we're projected to run 45 k over budget on this particular line item. And, you know, we'll then we'll be able to see that. And we'll talk about updating those cost projections here in in just a moment. You know, we can see cash flow is good on this job. You know, our projected cost is more than what we had originally anticipated that we we saw that there when we looked at the at the the last report. So these are things that we wanna be able to to manage on this job. And whether you're looking at one job like we're doing here or I were to go and just I can go through if I'm in a production meeting, I'm gonna go through job by job, and I'm looking to very quickly and easily get a handle on every one of these jobs. When I'm sitting down with that particular job's project manager, I'm able to see and review all of that information. You know, we can go from the job to, you know, to the other areas. We talked about managing the schedule on the job. Well, I wanna go over and manage the schedule. I wanna manage the timeline. I wanna manage the resource allocations. These are all things that that are enabling you to take control of the job. You know, you you know the the budgeted hours, you know the duration when you build the timeline or the duration of the task. Well, based on that, here's the resources I have to assign. Well and then based on where everybody is currently assigned, what resources do I have that are available? So these are all things that, once again, allowing you to take control of the job. You know, I need to manage all the documentation on this job. I need to manage the submittals, the RFIs. You know, I'm gonna come in here. You know, I'll look at the submittal log first. I know that, you know, part of my ability to to complete this job and to do the production work is I need to I need to get the submittals approved. And that's a whole process for me asking my server supplier for the information, me receiving it, me submitting it, me getting it back revised or revise and resubmit or rejected, and then sending notification back to others that the submittal data has been approved. But this is really, I think, critical part of the paper flow process. I I I say paper. I'll use air quotes when I use the term paper today because it's not really paper. You know, back in my day, certainly when I started, it was paper. I mean, literally, you're getting, you know, you know, 12 copies of submittal, sending eight copies on, and getting the approved copies back. Now a lot of that is done electronically. And with the right tool, once again, I have the ability to do that. I can go into, you know, particular, you know, item, and I wanna go into the to the particular item and I wanna and I wanna go ahead and I wanna manage the documentation for this particular submittal request. I wanna, you know, include the cut sheet or the drawing or whatever it is I need to get approved. So we have the ability to do that in, you know, right in the system. You know, we certainly have all the submittal correspondence. We have just general correspondence. We have RFIs. I need to be able to manage and track all that. Or maybe maybe here I wanna filter it. I wanna see just the RFIs. Here's all the RFIs incoming and outgoing, all the corresponding attachments. You know, I had a question on the drawing. I could click right in here and drill right down and see the actual drawing that I had a question on that I submitted, you know, for you know, to the to the general or the architect depending on who I sent this to to, you know, for, you know, for approval or to get my question answered. So have the ability to have all that information once again right at our right at our fingertips. So I think that's, you know, certainly, you know, very critical in being able to do this. So, you know, we we looked at some of the documentation. We looked at the scheduling. And, you know, we got to all that from the the core dashboard here. I mean, this is you know, we're doing everything from here. I wanna just shift gears for a minute because we talked about how important the work in progress is. So I'm gonna go over to my WIP dashboard, and I'm gonna here, I'm gonna manage everything about the work in progress process. So here's a list of all the jobs. I could certainly get this in a in a list format. I'm gonna look at my WIP report. Notice it's it's doing the, you know, the current over under billing calculations. When I go to each individual job, it's going to tell me the jobs that have, you know, projected gain or fade in profit. You know, we we like to see where the final profit is in the green. It's more than what we had anticipated. We're not there yet. But right now, we're projected based on what we know today. When I look at the revised estimates, we're seeing that we're projected to be over budget here, but under budget here. And in total, we're we're projecting to be under budget, meaning our estimated profit has gone up. Those are certainly good things. We're under build and guess what? Negative cash flow. So these are all things that they all go hand in hand. And with the right tools, all this information is is available at our fingertips. We have all that information here. We have the ability to come in and revise those field estimates, whether it's putting in an updated percent complete or putting in an updated dollars to finish or updating the units complete. There's really three primary methods to drive the, you know, the the projections or the forecast. I can estimate the percent I'm complete if I'm you know, I can look at a at an an item, a work item on a job and say, I feel like we're 40% done. And then I can enter that. It'll calculate out the remaining projected cost based on that. I can tell it the cost to finish. I'm not really sure what percentage I think we're done, but I know we need 50,000 to finish this and, you know, so much of labor, so much material, etcetera. So there's a number of different ways to do it or certainly the other is we can certainly do units complete. I can put in you know, if I have a measurable unit, I can put in the units that I've complete and it will it will calculate that for me. But the being able to do the WIP in real time, being able to see the WIP comparison for for one one point in time to a previous point in time, those are all extremely, extremely valuable. If I wanted to go and, you know, run run the WIP report as of any point in time, I certainly have the ability to do that. I can come in here, run the WIP report, but I wanna go back and see, what did the WIP report look like at the end of last month. I have the ability to go back and run it as of that point in time. And it'll go back and tell me, here's what it looked like at the February. You know, and it's also notice here also tracking the cash flow. We know how important cash flow is to us in this business. So I'm tracking the true cash in and and cash out. So those those are things I think once again allowing you to take control of the job. There's some great reports as you start to get into the the forecasting process and you're you're looking at the WIP report. I need to be able to compare different points in time. I wanna compare today and I wanna go back and see what how's that compared to where the WIP was at the January as an example. And it's gonna go and look through and it's gonna show me any job that had a change, you know, plus or minus, you know, gain or fade in estimated cost and estimated profit. Certainly, change orders can impact that as well. So assuming there were no change orders, in this case, there weren't. If my estimated cost is projected to go up, my estimated profit is projected to go down. Well, this is where I'm gonna start. I'm gonna start with the jobs that are saying, wow. Between this month and the last and the last whip schedule, we now have lost, quote, unquote, lost 48% of our projected $48,000 of our projected profit. So that's you know, then I'm gonna dig in deeper. I'm gonna get into that job. I'm gonna sit down. I'm gonna look at the at the job itself, drill into the job report, and go into that information and find out exactly, you know, what you know, why that had happened. I'm gonna be able to track, you know, when we're putting in those projections, you know, we wanna make sure that we're notating why we made a projection on that date that may have sent our projected profit plus or minus. So these are things that, you know, once again, we wanna be able to take advantage of. It's all part of of allowing you to take control of, you know, of your business, of the individual jobs. And if we manage every job to profitability, then, you know, overall, we will be successful. I wanna be able to look at, you know, certainly look at the job center, look at the at the at the WIP dashboard. But there are other reports that are critical as well. I wanna look at the I wanna look at the financial center. Gives me a, you know, a snapshot of the company's financial position. You're gonna show me the the p and l over a period of time, gonna show me the balance sheet, gonna let me drill into my open receivables report, payables report. I wanna be able to manage retainage. These are all things that are crucial and critical for us. I need to be able to see, you know, the unbilled retainage. I mean, too many times where we we can lose sight of the retainage and what's required to get the retainage released, the final retainage released. And we need to make sure that we we have the ability and the and the and the tools to be able to do that. So these are some of the things. And I'm gonna we're gonna look at some of the field components here momentarily. Wanna talk about a couple other things. You know, we kinda talked about job cost and we talked about the work in progress and how we manage that, manage and retainage. We talked about construction payroll. We'll talk about real time job costing, see an example out here in just a minute. But remember, the the the job the job should be driving everything. It does drive everything as far as the the location. You know, when we go we're on a job, whether a union contractor or nonunion contractor. You know, we need to know things like what local jurisdiction is this job in. I may have somebody from, you know, IBEW local two fifty going to do a work on a job that's in two sixties jurisdiction. There could be different rules. We need to be able to manage that. I need to know what state the job is in and what and what payroll locality if applicable. So in my example, I'm I'm in the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana area. I sit right on the border of all three states. And, you know, there are different rules, and all three states have local tax withholding as well as state withholding rules. And I need to know where the job is, what tax jurisdiction it's in, so the system can then withhold the proper payroll taxes. I need to know whether it's a job that has to produce certified payroll reports so that when I when I do the when I do the payroll, I can automatically produce the certified payroll report. That's a requirement if you're doing especially if you're doing any public work, for sure, you're you are responsible for submitting the certified payroll report, which is certifying that you have paid the proper wages on that job. So the job can drive all that. You can automate all that. You can automate the pay rates. We'll see an example of that here in just a minute and other things. So, you know, for instance, if I were to go in and enter time, and I'm I'm gonna show time entered from the field here in just a minute. But for for the sake of this example, I was just gonna come in here. And when I bring up an employee, now I'm gonna bring up Bill and it's gonna tell me Bill's rate is $20 an hour, his normal rate. But, you know, Bill's going to work on job three seventy one, which is a job that is a prevailing wage job. And when I go to that prevailing wage job, it tells me it's prevailing wage job, and it automatically changed Bill's rate to the prevailing wage rate. So it I didn't have to track that. I didn't have to manually figure that out. The system, you know, knows that from the from the job setup. So these are things that a construction specific tool can do and certainly help you take that pain out of payroll that we talked about. So before we go look at a couple of the field components, I wanna talk about a few other things. We talked a little just very high level. We talked about writing purchase orders, committing that cost to the job, writing subcontract agreements. A lot of you may have material that you're buying and and and have it in the shop or you have excess material comes back from a job that you wanna use on a on a future job. So, you know, we have the ability to track and maintain those inventory counts in in the in the shop or in in the yard as well, and then allocate cost from inventory to the job, from the job back into into inventory and out to another job. So that's just part of the purchase order and inventory component within computers. We talked about managing RFIs, submittals. We can do things like punch list and and, drawing logs, etcetera. All that's part of the document management. We looked a little bit at scheduling, you know, not only building the the timeline, but allocating resources, talked about subcontract. I'll touch on service here in a minute. Also wanna talk about managing your fleet and assets, your vehicles, your equipment. Whether it's just a fleet of pickup trucks, service vans, or you have large equipment, we need to be able to allocate the cost, maintenance and repair cost down to the individual asset. You know, if I have two pickup trucks and one and they're both the same age, but one is costing me twice as much as the other to maintain, That's a problem I need to be aware of. I have, you know, I have big pieces of equipment. What is the maintenance and repair cost? So when we have maintenance and repair, we wanna allocate it to the specific asset so we can evaluate. We can make intelligent proactive decisions on maybe when is the time to retire a piece of equipment because either it's too costly to maintain or maybe we're not utilizing it enough to justify owning it. And then, you know, we need to track where all of our assets are at. So, you know, tool and equipment tracking. And whether it's, you know, anything from small hand tools to large pieces of equipment, I wanna know where they're at. You know, the hammer drills out for repair. Now I got backhoe number one has been assigned out to job three forty seven, the Bobcat Municipal Building. You know, these are things that I wanna be able to track, not only to know the location, but then most importantly, especially on the large equipment. I need to allocate cost to the job for the use of my own equipment. You know, if I go rent a piece of equipment, I'm I'm very likely to and I I'm quite sure sure most of us in most cases when invoice comes in, we're gonna charge the job that the equipment was was rented for. Well, if I have my own equipment and I use it on a job and I don't do the same, I go to compare those two jobs, which one's gonna look better? The one that didn't have to pay for the use of the equipment because we owned it. Just because we own it doesn't mean it's not free it doesn't mean it's free to use. So treat that equipment as, you know, you're rent you're it's an internal rental center. You're renting it to yourself just as if you had to go rent it from someone else, allocate that cost properly to the job and with the right tool, make it very easy to do. You know, we wanna talk about we wanna manage opportunities. I wanna manage all the opportunities coming in. It's not it's you know, certainly, goal is to is to win more opportunities and then go through the life cycle. But I need to I need to start from which jobs are we even do we or do we have an opportunity to bid? Which ones are we working on? What what is what has been bid or quoted? What has been won? What has been lost so we can get statistics? I wanna be able to to drill down and look at all the opportunities that we're working on. I wanna drill down into the, you know, all the notes, the conversation. I wanna see the history of the phone calls, the meetings, the pre bid meetings, the the the site visit, whatever it might be. This could all be relevant information that was captured pre bid that now is relevant post bid as we're as we put the job into production. And with the CRM component, we can we can track all that. So before I I switch hats here and go out into the field, I wanna just take a quick look at service and then we'll we'll go out in the field and take a look at a couple of these things. But with service, I need to be able to manage, you know, preventative maintenance calls. May you know, maybe we have a regular scheduled maintenance. We have a preventative maintenance contract. We're gonna go out and service you quarterly, annually, monthly, whatever it might be. I need to be able to schedule those. I need to also be able to take calls on demand if you're doing that type of service work where somebody's gonna call. We got a problem here today and, you know, we're gonna notate the problem. We're gonna prioritize this because I gotta get somebody out there right away. It's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be quite warm this afternoon. The AC is not working, so people are leaving. So I need to get people out there. So gonna go ahead and enter that. And I prioritize that, so put it up at the top of the list. I'm gonna go ahead and assign that to Bill, and we're gonna get Bill out there that yet this afternoon. And I'm gonna go ahead and dispatch that out to the field, and we'll see what happens out in the field here momentarily. So just a quick look at some of the things we're gonna do, but, you know, we can certainly, you know, manage everything from your preventative maintenance contracts, your regularly scheduled service calls to on demand service calls. You know, we got all kinds of you know, the the great reporting to track profitability down to the individual work order level or by customer or by service tech. These are all things that are really important as you as you take control of that part of your business. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and put on my field hat now, and I'm gonna go out in the field. We've got a number of of, you know, great field components here. I'm gonna use the the web based field e solution, you know, for the sake of today's presentation. You know, no, we certainly also have where, you know, employees can enter time on their on their phone. They can do it on their iPad or their tablet. You know, I'm gonna go ahead and use this view because it's a little bit easier to see here in the webinar. But, you know, we can capture expenses, scan receipts, all this can be captured real time. I'm gonna focus today on really probably the three things. One, completing that service order that was sent out to the field. Two, entering time for my crew. Keeping in mind that each individual of the crew could have entered their time and it could have been routed to me for approval, but I'll, you know, I'll take the role of I'm gonna enter it for my crew to to streamline it a little bit here today. And then and then third, I'm gonna go ahead and enter my daily field report. Because as a site superintendent, I'm responsible for getting my time in either approving or entering for my crew the time for today, and are responsible for completing the the the daily field report. You know, keep in mind, we can also approve invoices out in the field. We can generate re request for additional material. We can view reports. We can view live job cost reports in the field at any point in time. So I'm gonna start with let's go ahead and and I'll put my service out on first, and I'm gonna go ahead and complete that work order that we just sent out to the field. So remember, you know, you sent me that work order today. Here's the work order. I can give I can tell you that I've arrived. I've I've I've accepted it. I've arrived on-site. I can give you updated status code. I'm gonna come in here. I'm gonna see all the information you sent me. I can see previous work history. All that information is available. So I'm the service tech. Maybe I wasn't out here last week or last month, but somebody else was. I've got all that information right at my fingertips. So I'm gonna come in then and I'm gonna go ahead and complete the work ticket. You know, I can I I use some material out here to fix the problem? I'm gonna go ahead and enter the material. I'm gonna enter the labor. Keeping in mind, this could all be you know, it could be managing your service vans inventory, and that's all part of the inventory component. So you know? Or I can maybe if I had to go to the the supply house and buy material, we can we can track that as well. But I'm gonna go ahead and I had labor time on this. How many hours do we spend? You could have unique price books for each individual customer. You can have a group price book where this customer, you know, this group of customers all get price level a. That's all part of the functionality within the within the service component. So so we got some time and material on that, on that work order. I can put in a description of what I did. I could upload a picture. I could have taken a before and after picture, but now I'm gonna go ahead and complete the work order. I'm gonna sign it. I need to capture the customer signature. Notice they priced out the ticket for me. I'm gonna go ahead and save that. I could print or email a copy, leave behind for the customer. But now I've completed that and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna send that back to the office for billing, back to the service billing manager. So and we'll see what that looks like here in just a minute. So we'll we'll flip back and I'll put my office hat back on here momentarily. But so that was the service work orders. Now let's take a look at the time entry. So I'm gonna go ahead and enter time for my crew. Like I said, each individual on the crew could enter their time and it could be forwarded to me for approval. In this case, I'm gonna go ahead and enter the time for my crew. So we worked on job three seventy one. We're all working on the electrical phase today, and we were doing the the electrical setting, the the exterior light fixtures. We had eight hours. And there's my crew. I already prebuilt my crew of five people working on this job. Maybe Craig left an hour early, so I'm gonna go ahead and modify that. So now we have thirty nine hours. I'm gonna go ahead now and submit that back to the office, and we'll see what happens back there in just a minute. And then last but not least, I'm gonna go ahead and fill out my daily field report. So, we've done the time. I'm gonna go ahead and create a new log entry for job 371. And we have different log types. In this case, I'm gonna do my general daily log, but maybe you have a safety incident or work authorization log. But I'm gonna go ahead and do just the general daily log. But if I can create that, I can I can, you know, prompt it for the to load the weather if I need to track the weather? I already entered the my cruise time or approved my cruise time, so I'm gonna drop that in there. You know, if we had a subcontractor out here, I can note that we, you know, we also had, you know, our the concrete contractor was out here and they had three people on-site today. I'll put some notes about what they did. You know, maybe we had inspector out here. I'm gonna note that. I'm gonna give you as the project manager back in the office, my story right, as the superintendent out in the field. I could upload pictures, other documents. This was a work authorization log. Maybe I needed to update the the GC or the owner's rep signature out there. If we were tracking units of production, I'm gonna update the production. But I'm gonna go ahead and save that field log and I'm gonna go ahead and send that back to the office. So now, you know, we did time, we did a service ticket, we did our field log. And now I'm gonna go ahead and let's go ahead and go back into the office and see the other side of that. So as the service manager, here's the service tickets that have been submitted. Here's the one we just did. I'm gonna go ahead and bring in that service ticket. I certainly have the ability to drill down if I need to make any any changes to what was entered. I I certainly could. And as a service manager, I have final approval authority here. All looks good to me. I wanna get a check a quick proof list of what we build, make sure our profit margin is where it should be. And that invoice is now sent back to the customer and that's the whole service cycle has been complete. I'm gonna go ahead and import the time. So as the as the as the payroll person, I'm gonna go ahead and import the time that has come in from the field. Those are those thirty nine hours that were coming in from today. I'm gonna go ahead and import that. There's the time. I have the ability certainly to drill down, make any modifications to that if needed. But that time is now queued up and ready to go. And remember, you know, that time came in for today. And even though it's not gonna be processed till next list of all the time it's been entered so far. But when I go in now, let's go back and look at the at the job dashboard for that particular job. So I'm gonna go back here, look at that job 371. And when I drill down to the cost to date and I drill down to the exterior light fixtures and I go down to today's date, notice those hours are already committed to the job. That cost is already committed to the job as pending payroll. That's the definition of real time job costing. So we see that in real time. It'll certainly be processed when payrolls run, but I get a real time picture of where this job stands. And then certainly last but not least, we brought in those field logs. So I'm gonna go ahead and import the field log. You know, I'm gonna go ahead and import the the daily log from today from job three seventy one. I certainly have the ability then to drill down and and drill into all the details. I can see, you know, all the I can see the employees, the weather, the subs, the notes, the pictures. Everything that was submitted from the field is now available to me in in the office. Or, you know, maybe I wanna manage I'm managing multiple jobs and I have today's log entry, but I wanna go back and look at all the log entries for job three seventy one. So, you know, go back to the beginning of time and show me every log entry for that particular job. So there's every log entry and maybe I'm looking for something specific or maybe I wanna see any day where we mentioned rain in in in the weather. So I wanna go ahead and search that job for any day that we had rain. It's gonna find any day that rain was mentioned on that particular job. And then I can drill down and say, okay. What was the problem? What was the notes? What were the comments from the field based on that day, based on that particular, you know, piece of information? So gives you a way I was talking to somebody earlier today and we're talking about I asked them how they did their daily field logs and they said, well, they they fill them out by hand on piece of paper and they put them in this box. And I said, well, then what happens? And they and they said, I don't know. I said, well, what happens if you have to go back and find out something that happened three months ago or six months ago? They said, I don't know. And I said and then we started talking about this. They said, well, that would be great. We could go and we could query the the data and say, know, find me any log entry that mentioned rain or mentioned delay or mentioned whatever. So that's the, you know, one of the many benefits of having all that information in, you know, in the system and really allowing you to take control of everything from, you know, from certainly from your job cost to your labor cost to your equipment cost, making sure you're properly allocating equipment cost to the job, managing the jobs you're bidding, managing the resources, managing the timeline, managing the document cation flow of of RFI submittals, etcetera. So you can see how a solution a a purposely built solution like Computerease can allow you to do all that. So I'm gonna come back to the slide deck here for a minute and follow-up with a couple things and then we'll certainly open it up to open it up to some questions. Alright. So we're gonna go back here and I wanna talk about a few a few other things. So, know, part of what we do here, Delta Computers, you know, we we we help not only build great solutions. We saw an example of that with a lot of the things we saw in computers, but we help build construction accounting skills. We have our our extremely popular construction accounting university, know, which which allows you to learn about construction accounting. But and regardless of the system you're gonna use, just the general concepts and things that you should know about construction accounting. So if you haven't checked that out, certainly, strongly recommend you check out our construction accounting university series. We we offer all kinds of continuing education, industry thought leadership. So we're we're certainly very much believe that we have a great solution for the industry, but we also we know we have a lot of expertise that we can share with everybody whether they're using our solutions or not. And I think that's, you know, really what makes, you know, us, you know, one of the, know, best in class as far as, you know, technology providers in the construction industry. So just, you know, just some things that we wanna, you know, we want you to be aware of and hopefully, allow you to take advantage of. You know, it's easy for me or someone on the team to, you know, talk about the, you know, computer ease and how great it is. But, you know, you can also check out what, you know, a lot of people on the review side say, you know, g two is one of the most popular today. And we have we, you know, we have a number of badges that we've been awarded. We have a number of great reviews out there. So please feel free to to check that out as well. There's there's a lot of things that people talk about. This was a comment from one of our longtime customers. And they were asked, you know, what's the value of ComputeEase? And and, you know, the the their answer was real simple. I can't imagine not using it. It's invaluable. You know, and and that's just what people you know, because and and they came from a generic solution, you know, many years ago and they moved to Computerese and just the, you know, the the time that it has saved them has been incredible. You know, what you know, as I said, you know, what makes us different? We're built for construction. You know, we we have we have I know I gave you my background as far as the industry expertise, but we have a whole team of of consultants and experts that have years and years and years, hundreds, if not, in in total thousands of years of construction experience that can bring all that to the table, whether it's helping you implement the system initially or helping you with your ongoing use of it. You know, easy to get started, get, you know, what the know, depending on where you're at, the size of contractor, you know, we come up with a very tailored plan to meet meet your needs. We are the trusted provider in this industry. We have the experience with everything from job cost accounting to payroll. We have a payroll service component for those of you that want to outsource the payroll processing piece of it. We would do very similar work as to what an ADP or a paycheck, may more of, you know, maybe household names across all industries. But ours is construction specific for the Computerese end user and there's no disconnect. Where the the problem with using an outside payroll service, it's great for managing some of the compliance and tax filings, and it will take that off of your plate. But you still now you still have to reconcile with your job cost accounting system, and that creates a that creates a tremendous burden on you. Or with ComputeEase and our payroll service, it's all done as one solution. All the data only lives in one place. There is no reconciliation. So I'm gonna take a couple of questions here. But before we do, I am gonna launch one last polling question here. If you'd like to be contacted to learn more about ComputerEase, please go ahead and check the yes box while that's up. I'll leave that open for a few seconds while we get into some questions. So please feel free to put questions into the q and a box and we'll go ahead and get to as many as we can. Got one question. It's, know, would would you consider Computerese to be more efficient than a solution that I'm currently using, which is QuickBooks? So, I mean, absolutely. That that is, you know, probably where the vast majority of our customers come from is QuickBooks. They find QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets and other things that you're trying to bolt on to QuickBooks that because of the non construction nature of QuickBooks to be very time consuming. So I think that's certainly, yeah, what I would find. You you're gonna you're gonna see tremendous value in Computerese compared to a solution like QuickBooks. Kind of a follow-up question to that is, can you tell me the anything about the pricing and how long it takes to implement? So pricing is you know, we kinda need a couple questions answered from you, number of users configuration. We will certainly reach out. I see a a handful of pricing questions coming through. We'll reach out and follow-up with anybody that had questions about the about pricing. This computer has handled the work in progress schedule. Think this was pre submitted. I know we talked about that a little bit earlier. Certainly does. And allows you to to manage the the the WIP process as well as tracks all of the all of the cash flow. I'm currently using Computers. Been interested in moving into your payroll service. Can you give give me any information about the pricing and time frame to to make a change? So, yeah, couple once again, couple questions we need to we need to ask you, you know, average number of employees on payroll. Are you currently doing it in house or using a third party provider? That's just a few things that we we have to do a little bit differently on on the transition. But we'll we'll certainly reach out and answer those questions for you and then see see what we can do. So it's a great great question. Does Computerease integrate with other solutions, other project management or service solutions? Certainly does. While we have project management features and service features, which I, you know, we I showed as an example today, We also have the ability to integrate with other third party solutions. So you know, if the you know, you have a specific solution that you wanna integrate it with your job cost accounting solution, being computerized, we certainly have the ability to do that. So great great question. How do you update the WIP projections? So, we have a really we talked about I know we only touched on a very high level. And I know I mentioned the Construction Accounting University. There are some great sessions there about the entire WIP process. But essentially, there's three ways to update the, you know, the the work in progress information. I'm gonna go ahead and close that poll by the way and go back to the last slide here with some general contact information as we wrap up. But on the whip, there are three different ways to update the forecast. Either I can estimate the percent I am complete, I can estimate the dollars I need to complete, or I can estimate or enter the units that I have complete and have that determine the percent complete. And and we handle we handle all of those. So these are some great questions. With that, I think we've covered most of the questions. Like I said, there's a couple more coming in about pricing and possibly switching the impurities. Those, like I said, we will reach out and have a one on one discussion because it just ask a few questions, make sure we can, you know, give you a good show