Name: Protect Your Margins with Deltek ComputerEase
Uploaded: 2026-08-12T19:31:26.548Z
Duration: 57 min 52 s
Description: Protect Your Margins with Deltek ComputerEase

Transcript for "Protect Your Margins with Deltek ComputerEase": Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, depending on what time zone you're joining us from, and welcome to today's webinar. Couple quick housekeeping notes before we get started. For the best experience today, please use Google Chrome. The audio for today's presentation is streamed through your computer as there is no dial in, so please make sure the volume is turned up. You can download the presentation slides via the resource tab up in the top right hand corner. And please note that you will receive an email with a link to the on demand recording, within twenty four hours after today's webinar ends. So please feel free to watch it back, share with someone else within your organization or in the industry you may benefit from today's content. Please type in any questions in the q and a box throughout the presentation. We'll get to as many of those as we can as well as some that, were presubmitted. If time allows at the end, any we don't get to, we'll certainly follow-up individually offline. So today's topic, we're gonna talk about protecting your margins with Deltek Computorese. Quick introduction. I'm your host for today, John Ivers. I'm the vice president general manager here at Deltek Computorese. I've got thirty five plus years of experience working in the construction industry. Spent the first ten of those working in the industry for a contractor, held various roles over my ten year career there, and I've spent the last twenty five plus years serving the over 6,000 contractors that we have nationwide as a leader of the Deltek Computoreach team. You know, my role as the VP general manager is to help equip contractors with the tools they need to manage profitability, drive growth, and meet the ever changing complex construction requirements. So before we get started, I'd like to launch a quick poll here, get an idea of who we have in the audience today. So I'd like to know what your current accounting or construction ERP system is. Are you maybe using Deltek Computers already? Maybe you're using Foundation, Jonas, QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, or other. I'll go ahead and launch that poll, and we'll give it, about thirty seconds or so. Give everybody a chance to answer the answer the question, and then we'll share the results and continue on. Give it about another fifteen seconds or so. And we'll go ahead and close the poll here. So we got a good number of you, I see, using Delta Computers. We certainly thank you and appreciate your, your business. We got a number of you on QuickBooks and then a few on Sage and a few, have checked others. So certainly, you know, welcome everybody, but, and appreciate, you sharing that, information, with us. Alright. So as we mentioned, you know, today's topic, you know, we're gonna talk about, you know, how some of the things we can do to protect our profits, hopefully, to, you know, increase our profits. Certainly, we wanna protect them, make sure that we're not, you know, we're we're operating on very thin margins to begin with. I mean, I think that's one of the things I mean, I love the construction industry, and and it it is great for so many reasons. And it's also can be very, you know, it can be very challenging because we are typically working on a very thin margin. It can be very great, very profitable business, but something goes wrong, we don't protect those margins, things can go can go south in a hurry. You know, a a lot of times we're doing, especially, you know, for example, those of you that are using QuickBooks that are on the call. You know, what QuickBooks is what I will call a generic accounting solution. And a lot of times, if you're using something that wasn't purposely built for your industry, in this case, our industry, the construction industry, you end up you're doing a lot of things manually. You're, you know, you're doing a lot of things in spreadsheets. You're you're doing double entry. You know, construction is challenging because, you know, a lot of times, you know, we're we go over budget. I mean, it it you know, just 31% of jobs finish within 10% of the budget. I mean and it only takes a job, you know, or two to, you know, to to, to really miss the mark, and that can that can really do a you know, have a catastrophic impact on the company's bottom line. So, certainly, we wanna make sure we protect those margins, protect those profits. Ideally, obviously, our goal with every job is to come in under budget. And, you know, with the right system, we can be proactive. We can see these things. We can track these things and see problems before it's too late and give us a chance to be proactive with our decision making rather than reactive. I you know, I would rather know that something is headed over budget before it actually gets to be over budget. You know, as I mentioned, if you're using a generic tool like QuickBooks, and this nothing against QuickBooks as a generic accounting tool, but it's not built for our industry. It's gonna make your life and your job harder. You know? No or limited job costing. You know? The with Computerease, job costing is at the center of what we do. With with something like QuickBooks, at best, it's an afterthought. You know, we're we're, you know, we're not able to clearly see the profit margins. We don't have the right billing tools, which makes billing slow and complicated. For instance, maybe you're doing commercial work and you have to produce a pay request on a on a a progress type billing form, whether it's AIA, g seven zero two, g seven zero three, or something similar. You know? And if you don't have the right tools to build that form and you're doing that manually, it's gonna be very you know, you're you're gonna really complicate the billing process and slow down the billing process. You know? Payroll compliance, you know, tax and payroll compliance. Payroll is not easy no matter what line of work you're in, but in construction, I think we would all agree payroll is very complex. We have to deal with we have to deal with things like with union payroll. We have to deal with prevailing wage, you know, nonunion prevailing wage payroll. We have to deal with certified payroll reporting, be it whether you're union or nonunion. We have to deal with state and local taxes that vary based on the job. You know, if you're if you had everybody working in one location, once you figured out the tax withholding rules for that one location, unless they change, you know, you you've got that mastered. Think about every new construction job, you know, and especially depending on what part of the country you're in. If you're in a part of the country that that you have to deal with not only state taxes but local withholding taxes and remember, as the employer, it's your responsibility to properly withhold payroll taxes from your employees when they're work when you know, based on where they work. And that's not easily done when you have people moving from job to job. You're required to pay them the right pay rate. We talked about union or, you know, or nonunion prevailing wage, certified payroll. Certified payroll report, you're certifying that you've paid people the right rate. Well, it starts with you have to know what that rate is, and you have to be able to pay them the correct rate. And think about, you know, maybe you're a nonunion contractor and you have somebody working on prevailing wage job part of the day and a nonprevailing wage job different part of the day. They may be doing the exact same thing, and you're required to pay them different pay rates. You may have somebody doing two different tasks on the same job in the same day, and based on what they're doing, you have to pay them different rates. For instance, maybe they were up on a piece of equipment, and you have to pay them operator scale for the four hours they ran a piece of equipment. Then the second half of the day, they're down on the ground, and now they're being paid, you know, labor scale or some other, you know, task depending on what they're performing. So that can all be very complicated, especially if you're doing it manually. With the right tool, with a tool like with Deltek Computer is you're able to automate the pay rates, automate the based on the task and the job, automate the payroll tax withholding rules. And once again, remember, it's your responsibility, and I can't stress this enough, to pay the right rate and withhold the right payroll withholding taxes. And that's that's a lot easier said than done. And, you know, I always tell people, if you go to work in a new jurisdiction, certainly nothing prevents you from doing that. Nothing prevents you from being able to comply, but you have to know that going in. I have to know what I'm getting into. I've had people come into I happen to be in the in the the Cincinnati, Ohio area. So I sit on the border of three states, and all three states have not only state taxes but local withholding tax rules as well. So the very common for a contractor in this area to be working I may have an employee working in multiple states and multiple local tax jurisdictions all within the same day, certainly in the same week, month, etcetera. Well, it's my responsibility to know that. And it's not that somebody can't come in from out of town and manage that, but the time to know that is before you get here, not wait till you get here and say, oh, I didn't know I was supposed to do that. And so just, you know, be very careful and make sure you understand the rules. You know, same way, you know, I talk to contractors all the time that that, you know, maybe they're they're doing a prevailing wage job for the first time, or maybe they have shied away from doing prevailing wage work because they were confused or afraid of the of the of the administrative work that they were gonna have to do to do that. Once again, it's not all that complicated, but it becomes complicated if you're not aware of it and you don't know that going in, You know? And, certainly, the the the prevent the prevailing wage rates is a great example is I need to make sure I know what those pay rates are before I even bid the job because I need to make sure I'm bidding it using the right pay rate. These are all things that are, you know, very common in our industry and very easy to manage if you have the right tool to help you do it. You know, I think great construction accounting starts with having the right construction accounting software. You know, we we need to be able to easily produce our our our work in progress or our our WIP report. You know, if you're once again, if you're one of those folks using QuickBooks, if you're preparing a WIP schedule today, which certainly I hope you are, you're not doing it in QuickBooks. You're doing it outside of QuickBooks, probably doing it in Excel, doing it manually, and it's creating a lot of time, you know, spent you're spending a lot of time and effort to do something where in computer is as an example, I should be able to produce that WIP report at at any time, do my forecast adjustments, etcetera. You know, I wanna be able to make sure that I can that I can quickly and easily bill my customer in the right format, be it a time and material, be it the, you know, a a progress billing, be it on the AIA billing format or some other similar format, a unit based bill. Maybe you're doing DOT work as an example, and you get paid by the unit. Once again, different billing format. But if you have the right tools, you should be able to do that. And then, certainly, have a having all those built in compliance tools that that take the pain out of payroll make it easy. When I set up the job, it knows the local tax jurisdiction. It knows based on the the the job what rate table to use, you know, for as far as, you know, either union, you know, or nonunion prevailing wage, automatically produce my certified payroll reports, make the payroll process very easily. And for those that wanna outsource their payroll, which is still certainly very common, you know, with Computerease, you know, we have a payroll processing component to our business offering that eliminates the disconnect between a third party payroll provider such as maybe an ADP or Paychex. Nothing wrong certainly with those companies as payroll service providers, but they're not connected to your job cost accounting solution where the Computery's payroll service is is all driven within one software solution that can the, you know, the computery solution. So we we can really make payroll very painless and very easy to to manage. You know, one of the things you know, we talk about job cost and, you know, and then certainly how that's that's the center of of everything we do. You gotta have real time job costing. I'm gonna talk about the definition of that in just a minute. And it's gonna help that's gonna help you make better business decisions. And it's not only getting real time actual cost to date information, but I need I then need to be able to forecast. You know, where am I projected to go? If I in other words, if I've spent 50% of the budget on a line item on a job okay, that's fine. I'm not over budget yet. But what if I've only done 40% of the work? If I've already spent half the budget, half the hours slash dollars, however you wanna look at it, but I've only done 40% of the work, At that rate, at that pace, guess what? I'm going to go over budget. I'm not there yet. I could wait until I'm over budget then have the report tell me I'm over budget. But wouldn't you wanna know that you're forecasted, you're headed over budget? And it's real simple. That's what the whole whip process is all about. We'll see an example of that here in just a little bit. But, you know, I think that's something we need to be certainly aware of. It gives you a a clear view of not only where you're at, but where you're going based on where you're at. It's not often that we get to see, you know, kind of into the future, so to speak, to see where we're going. But, you know, I know that if I've already spent half of the budget and I've only done 40% of the work, I've got a problem because at that same pace, I'm going to go over budget. That's something, you know, we need to be proactive. We need that. Certainly, the information is relevant after the job is over when I can add it up and see that I went over budget, But I wanna know that I'm headed over budget, and we'll talk about some ways we do that here in just a little bit. You know, I need to improve the the, you know, the accuracy of my billing, the the timeliness and and accuracy of the billing. I wanna make sure I'm billing on the right form on time and sending it to the right place. The, you know, surefire way to, you know, delay cash flow, and we know how challenging cash flow can be for us in this industry. Surefire way to delay cash flow is to not bill properly. Be either send it to the wrong place, on the wrong form, or or or or send it, you know, after it was due. Make sure that we can bill accurately every time and on time. And then, certainly, we wanna take the pain out of payroll. I mean, all those things you know, I mentioned the different pay rates, the the proper tax withholding. Sounds complicated, and it and it certainly is that you know? But it can be made very easy if you have the right tool. It's certainly com complex and gonna be cumbersome to do if you're doing it manually. If you have to manually figure out the pay rates, you have to manually figure out, okay. This job, I I'm I need to withhold this tax and then a different job the same day or in the same week, I have to withhold something different. You have to manually go through and calculate all that. Something's going to get missed. You know, things like we talk about prevailing wage. One of the things that I see missed a lot is the, you know, people are out of ratio. For instance, you know, the prevailing wage rules on a job may state that for every one journeyman, you can have one apprentice. You know? That that doesn't mean you can't have two journeymen. Doesn't mean you can't have two apprentices and no journeyman. But what it does mean is you can't have two or you can't pay two people at the apprentice rate without paying somebody the journeyman rate. I mean, one to one means for every one journeyman I pay, I can pay one apprentice. If I only have one apprentice out there and that's the only person on the job, I need to pay them the one journeyman rate because I can't I can't pay an apprentice rate until I'm paying a a journeyman rate. So little things like that, once again, manually be very hard to track and manage. With the right tool, very simple, very easy. You know, with with Deltek ComputerEase, I mean, you know, we are here to power success at every stage of the project life cycle. You know, we're we're gonna you know, we're certainly going to you know, we're gonna win the job. You know, we wanna capture the right opportunities at the right margins. We're gonna plan to do the work. We're gonna you know, we're we're trying to reduce the risk as much as we can before we start. We're gonna execute. We're gonna protect our margins. We're gonna optimize performance, you know, productivity, make sure that we're we stay fully compliant throughout the life of the project. And then, certainly, we're gonna analyze not only at the end of the job but throughout the job's life cycle to make sure we can constantly be making better decisions and drive continuous improvement and certainly, hopefully, improvement to the to the profit margin, as, you know, as well as the the process as a whole. You know, certainly, you know, with DeltaEC computer is, I mean, it you know, it's it's built to be an intelligent platform. You know, with, you know, control is in is in its d n DNA. I mean, we're certainly incorporating more and more you know, certainly, AI is certainly a big thing today for all of us. We're certainly incorporating more and more AI across all of our solutions. You know, gonna give you insight, you know, and and and automate some of the, decision making process, some of the reporting as needed, you know, continue to to build out our mobile apps. As we know, the especially in construction, the workforce is mobile. We have a lot of people working in the field, so it's important that we can very easily communicate in real time between field and office. And, certainly, you know, we we, you know, we're building all this to make sure that we are compliant, you know, that we do have, you know, we we have all the information you need, and we're able to check all the all the right boxes as far as compliance goes. You know, and I I know I've mentioned a couple times talking about real time job costing, and and that you know, we'll talk about that a little bit more in just a few minutes. But I wanna you know, for I know I gave my background, and I've been doing this for thirty five plus years. The definition of real time has changed over that time. When I started in in the industry and I was working in a contractor's office, when we said real time job costing, what that meant was after we gathered time this week for last week's time, you know, we spent Monday, you know, Tuesday collecting, entering time. Wednesday, we processed payroll, and we posted it. And when we posted it, now our system was update, and that was real time because that was as real time as we could get. On, you know, on the middle of this week, we had a real time job cost report. But in reality, we were ten days behind. I mean, that you know, the labor that just got posted today, some of it was ten days ago. Today, with this a tool like Computerease, when we say real time, everything happens in real time. When the time come time should be submitted daily. That's, you know, with the with the great tools that are available to submit time on a daily basis. Time should be coming in each and every day. Those hours and and project and committed dollars should be showing on your job cost report today even though they won't be paid until the middle of next week. That's what real time means today. When I you know, in addition to that, when I write a purchase order or a subcontract, committed cost, real time hits the job. I'm not waiting for the invoice to come in from the supplier or the subcontractor. I've already committed to spend that. So I know that I've committed to spend that portion of the budget because I've issued a purchase order or a subcontract agreement. And, you know, so I think that's important, the, you know, managing and tracking committed cost. But the the real the real change in real time is the labor. I mean, it was very common years ago that we entered time for the entire week one time after the week was over. And until payroll was posted, we we could not see that on our job cost reports. Now we should see that every day. Time should be coming in daily, and it should be reflected on our job reports even though it won't be posted until, you know, sometimes a week or a week and a half later. You know, Computerease, you know, it says that the is that the core of what we're doing is this whole platform? I mean, you know, we're gonna have you know, we're gonna build allow you to build schedules, manage resources, manage all your accounting, inventory, purchasing, you know, collect time and expense information from the field in real time, and, certainly, they can give you, you know, clarity into your business. You know, we're gonna see and we'll see some examples of this, the, you know, interactive dash boards, the you know, our job center, our work in progress dashboard, and then certainly state of the art industry reporting, including that most important report that sometimes gets overlooked or is complicated for those that aren't using a construction specific tool, that work in progress report is really is is a very key component to, you know, what what the contractor should be doing. And we're gonna give you a clear view of your profits. Once again, we'll see an example of this here in just a minute. You know, we're gonna use that WIP report. And remember, the the WIP report is so critical to me because it's it's gonna tell me not only where I'm at but where I'm going based on where I'm at. It's gonna track, you know, am I projected to, you know, to maintain my profit margin? Has some of the profit faded? You know, have have I do I have, you know, erosion in my in my final profit? It's gonna manage my cash flow, track that. It's gonna manage my over under billing. Certainly, over under billing calculation from the WIP report is crucial to a contractor producing an accurate financial statement. I mean, without the over under billing adjustment on the p and l and the corresponding adjustment on the balance sheet, you can't produce an accurate financial statement for a contractor. Amount bill does not equal revenue. You know, over billing does not equal profit. You know, if you if you wonder, I mean, what's the first thing someone outside the organization is gonna want alongside your financial statements if you're talking to the the bonding agent, the surety underwriter, the banker? They wanna see your financials. And what do they wanna see alongside that? Your work in progress schedule. Because one without the other, I can make a financial statement look real good if I don't have to support it with a, you know, with with a work in progress schedule. I could I could make overbillings look like profit, and I could look very it could look very healthy. But what we're looking for, what those outside agencies are looking for, they wanna see. There's nothing wrong with overbilling. Overbilling is great for cash flow. But if not managed or mismanaged, which is what people wanna make sure we're not doing, it can be very problematic. I need to see that. I need to have a healthy balance sheet that supports the overbilled amount if if if I'm in that overbilling situation. You know, we wanna make sure that we our billing is accurate every time and it's on time. So, you know, whether it's an AIA bill, a unit bill, retainage. Think about the you know, something get outside of construction, you start talking about retainage, and people are like, what are you talking about? You know? And but we all know in this in this industry, we know how complicated and how much of our final profit could be tied up in retainings. That last release of retainings, that final retainage payment, you know, may contain or it does contain, you know, a a big chunk of our profit, and we sometimes we know how difficult it can be to get that released. I mean, it's there for a reason to hold everybody to task and make sure that I gotta dot all the i's and cross all the t's. You know, I gotta complete gotta complete the punch list. I gotta do all the closeout documents, you know, the the warranties, etcetera. I need I need to do all that, and guess what? I'm not going to get the retainings released until I do. And if I don't have a handle on that as a company, I don't know where that where that retaining sits on each job. One, I wanna I wanna know it throughout the life of the job because, hopefully, that you know, I'm able to get that reduced. They're not holding a, you know, a flat 10%, let's say, across you know, until the end of the job. But at the end of the day, I need to I need to have a constant eye on where that sits and what do I have to do to get that final retainage payment. And I've seen too many times where, you know and it may just seem like a, you know, a a small or immaterial amount, but it can add up over over multiple jobs. And you got a little bit of retainage hanging out on each one of those jobs because there's one thing we haven't gone back to do. Because it's real easy to get to the end of the job. You're 99.99% done, and I wanna move on to the next job. And nobody wants to go back and do that one little annoying item that's gonna allow us to get that last bit of rechange released. Well, it all starts with tracking that. And without the right tool to track that, it's very easy to lose sight of that. You know, as I mentioned the, you know, the mobile workforce, the, you know, making sure that we keep the field and the and the office and the and, you know, in sync, you know, really you know, so we wanna do things, be able to capture expense receipts in real time in the field, have them have them posted to job cost. I don't wanna wait till the credit card bill comes in to post at the job cost. I I've got the receipt. I I wanna go ahead and enter that and post that. And when the credit card bill comes in, I'll reconcile it against those receipts. And we already talked about the importance of getting time in on a daily basis, not only because it gives us real time job costing, but think about how much more accurate it'll be if I enter my time today rather than wait till next week and try to remember what I did today. So really something that we wanna make sure that we're that we stay on top of. Talk about, you know, taking the pain out of payroll, and this is one of the areas that I think just, you know, I I can't stress enough. I mean, I you know, I I've mentioned my ten years in in working in the industry, and and, you know, one of my many roles there over over my ten years was being in charge of of of getting payroll processed, and I can tell you firsthand how complicated it can be. I can tell you firsthand how problematic it can be and and what challenges I can face if, you know, but, you know, I because I was there before we had Computorease, and I was there after we were using Computorease. And once we had a system that could assist us with doing these things, it became a lot easier. But need to make sure that we are, you know, we are staying compliant. We're properly withholding taxes. We're paying the right rates. We're producing the certified payroll reports where you have a handle on the prevailing wage or the union rates. It's not you know, certainly prevailing wage can require me to pay different rates for the same same employee on two different jobs. I could have union employees working, you know, from one local working in another local's jurisdiction, and the rates may vary slightly. Well, I need to make sure I'm on top of all that. And with a system like Computery, we can certainly do that. So with that, I'm gonna shift gears here for just a minute. We're gonna take, you know, take a look at some of these things within the Computery system. Like I said, for for the sake of today's presentation, I'm gonna go ahead and use Computery to show some of these things. But, you know, whether you're, you know, whether you're using, you know, Computery or something similar, you know, you you certainly wanna be able to to manage all these things and be able to to to do this. And I think if you have the right tool or the right system, it's gonna be much, much easier to do. So I'm gonna go ahead and shift gears here for a minute and share my computer screen, and we'll spend the next few minutes going through some things. And I'll give you some examples of some of the things we just talked about. And now keep in mind, and we'll we'll launch a polling question here in just a little bit at the end of the presentation. You know, if you if you want to be contacted to learn more about what Computerease could do for you, especially if you're not already a Computerease user, we'll be more than happy to reach out after today's presentation and and and speak on a, you know, more individual level on how it can be you know, how the system can benefit your your company. But I wanna I wanna use the system to just give some examples of some of the things we talked about, some of the, you know, some of the real time job costing, some of the, you know, some of the work in progress schedule, things like that. So I'm gonna start with because as I said, you know, job cost is at the center of what any good construction accounting systems should should do. So I'm gonna start with the job center. Let let's go to the dashboard. Let's let's go to our job dashboard, which gives me for any particular job, I'm just looking at this one particular job as an example, gives me one place to go. And, you know, whether I'm on the accounting side, ownership side, project management side, All this is relevant information. And, certainly, keep in mind, if you're not familiar with computers, you can certainly control what each user can do and see. But at a, you know, at a at a high level, this is the this is the job dashboard. I'm seeing everything from the original contract, the current contract including change orders, my estimated cost, my projected cost. We'll talk about those cost projections here in just a minute, how that all ties into the the work in progress calculation and process. I wanna see my estimated profit, my projected profit, my cost to date, my billing to date. I'm seeing everything at a very high level. I wanna drill down on the cost to date. I wanna now see it broken out by activity depending on what type of work you're performing, what trades you're in, you're gonna see all this broken out. But I'm able to see each individual line item, actual versus estimated cost, actual versus estimated hours. If I wanna see the detail, I can drill down on any one activity, and I can see every detail of labor, materials, subcontract, equipment charge that went against that particular activity. And remember, when we talk about labor cost, and I wanna I'm gonna pause here for a minute, It's not just the x per hour you pay the employee. We need make need to make sure we have an a good handle on labor, overtime, burden, the payer the employer payroll taxes, FICA FUTA, pseudo workers' comp, fringe benefits. If I'm paying part of the employee's health insurance, contributing the match to their 401K, providing vacation and holiday pay, those are all a cost to me as the employer, and and they need to be reflected on the job cost. Because when I talk about labor rate, it's not the $25 an hour that maybe that that we're paying somebody. What is the true what is the fully burden or the total labor rate per hour? Wanna be able to track that. Wanna be able to analyze not only the hours against the budget, but the rate against the budget. You know, what's our actual rate versus our estimated rate? And we wanna make sure that we are staying, you know, within budget on both of those. I mean, you could be I could be under on the hours, but over on the rate and be over the in in total budget. You know? So we wanna make sure that we if we are over, we're we're able to identify where. Did we go over on the hours and or the rate? I wanna be able to quickly and easily see all the pay applications. I don't wanna have to go to another screen, to another part of the system to be able to see that. I wanna see all the pay apps. So maybe I need to see what was on pay app number 21. I wanna be able to just very quickly and easily drill down. In this example, this particular job was I'm billing on a the AIA, the g seven zero two, g seven zero three. Whether it's this type of form or something very similar or, you know, or time and material invoice or unit billing invoice, I wanna be able to have that information at my fingertips. We talked about how important the committed cost is. Here's committed cost on this job. I haven't been invoiced for this yet, but I have written a purchase order and or subcontract agreements, So I've committed to spend that budget. So, you know, think about that. If you had a budget for $10,000 for material on a particular line item on a job and you you haven't been invoiced for any yet, one could look at that and say, oh, I got 10,000 to spend. I have actual was zero and budget was 10. But what if I've already written a purchase order for 9,500? Left to spend is only 500 because I'm gonna see that commitment against the budget. You know? And then I can drill down to see the detail. I can see the detail of all my open purchase orders, all of my open subcontract agreements. I mean, this is, once again, all information I can get to very quickly and easily. I wanna see a list of maybe I'm I wanna do some research on an invoice we had previously paid on this job. I wanna be able to drill down and see a list of all the invoices. I wanna be able to maybe actually go to the invoice itself. I don't wanna have to go to the filing cabinet in today's world, today's paperless world. I certainly should be able to go right to the invoice itself, you know, and bring up the attachment and be able to see that invoice in real time. So these are just some of the benefits of, you know, using a system that is built to do all this for us. You know, we we wanna be able to route invoices for approval. We wanna be able to to see the history. I mean, a lot of times, you know, we can either automate that process. I mean, maybe if I need a project manager to approve every invoice for his or her job, I wanna be able to see that. Or maybe I'm maybe I wanna be able to, you know, manually route that. So whether you're automatic automatically routing it or manually routing it, I wanna see that. I wanna see the history of that within within the solution. Yeah. I wanted a quick glance. I wanna see our our projected profit is faded here. You know, we're we can see estimated was 52 and and projected as 38, but the the graph here gives me a clear visual. Okay. I'm I'm a little bit of a danger here. I'm now expected to make less than what I had originally anticipated. You know, I can drill down, and we'll we'll see more of this when we get into the into the work in progress dashboard here in a minute. But I wanna drill down and see, okay, where are we projected to go over budget? And right now, I'm forecasting an over budget situation in the plumbing rough of almost a little over $14,000. So we can see that, and that's because we're able to put in our updated projections that'll tell us. I mean, it's you know, we we know the contract. We know the budget. We know what we spent today. We know what we billed the date. What I need to know was what did we complete for the amount that we spent. So, you know, the the big you know, I think the number one rule is do don't ever confuse percent spent with percent complete. Because very rarely, if ever, will the percent you have spent equate to the percent that you have completed. I mean, if if you assume because you've spent 50% of the budget, you've done 50% of the work, you're you will almost always, if not always, be incorrect. Because if I asked for a show of hands, you know, if I was in person, I'd ask for a show of hands. How many of you ever do a job for exactly what you budgeted it was gonna cost? And nobody would raise their hand because it very rarely happens. So, hopefully, and more often than not, you're coming in under budget. But the worst assumption is because I've spent half the budget, I've done half the work. You know, a few other things here before we go look at the work in progress dashboard. I mean, there's things like being able to quickly and easily, you know, get into your filing cabinet. I can see documents, you know, for this job, very easily get attached to the job itself, whether it's photos from the field, maybe it's, you know, contract the original contract we signed with the owner or the GC or one of our subs, whatever that may be. All that information is easily tracked right in the in the dashboard itself. You know? From the dashboard, I can very easily get to, you know, other components, the other things that are very, very important as well. I I need to manage things like submittals, RFIs, all the documentation that goes along with managing a job. I wanna come in here, and on this particular job, I've looked at the financial information on the job, but now I need to be able to go in. I wanna quickly and easily be able to see, well, what's the status of all my submittals? You know, I've, oh, I've requested data. I've received it. I've submitted it. It's come back approved, revised and resubmit, rejected, whatever the case may be. This is very critical to keeping the job moving forward, keeping it on schedule. We you know, there's a lot of documentation, you know, you know, quote, unquote paperwork. Back in my day, it actually used to be physical paperwork. Now, you know, most of this is electronic. You're attaching a cut sheet. You're sending it upstream, getting it approved, and it's coming, you know, coming back downstream. But, you know, the documentation goes up and down the ladder. You know, the, you know, if I'm a subcontractor, I I'm asking for information from my supplier. They're sending it to me. I'm sending it to the general who's sending it to the architect, and then it's getting approved and kinda and working its way back down. But we need to manage that. Where are we at in the process? You know? We need to be able to to manage things like, you know, the all all of our correspondence, RFI, you know, request for information, and nobody's responded, I need to see that very quickly and easily. It needs to be flagged. I need to see, okay. I had a question on a drawing which may be holding us up. They're late in responding. That that's a red flag I need to be able to address. You know, I need to be able to we looked at the the list of change orders. We saw just the total approved change orders. I need to see not only the approved change orders, but what's pending? What have I requested a change order for that I haven't received yet? I haven't been responded to. Once again, very easy at the end of the job, and we, you know, we all know in construction a lot of times, we, you know, we're doing work on a change order, you know, based off maybe a verbal approval or something other than the the official signed document. A lot of times, we're waiting on that document to actually be able to bill for it. Very easy to lose track of a pending change order that we we may have already done some of the work, if not all of the work. We never get the final document approved. Therefore, we never bill for it, and we walk away from that job leaving change orders money on the table. We did the work, and we didn't get paid for it. I had a a contractor one time tell me that one of the biggest returns on their investment in Computerease was the fact that you know? And and they were very profitable, and they had, you know, what what they thought were some excellent project managers. But they had one particular project manager that they were able to uncover that almost every job that that they ran, they were leaving change orders out there pending and didn't see them through to completion. So, therefore, they were leaving money on the table. The and that was coming right off the bottom line. I mean, they were they were profitable on the job, so it didn't it it didn't, you know, it didn't get caught maybe as as it should. But all of a sudden, they implemented computer reason and started tracking the change orders from the time they requested them. And all of a sudden, they said, well, wait a minute. We we gotta see these through to completion. So, you know, very easy to once again lose sight. And it's you know, we're talking about you know, you think about the tide over today's session about protecting that margin. So it's not only making sure that we're not losing money, but it's making sure that we're making as much money as we should. I mean, because I'm profitable, it doesn't mean I'm as profitable as I should be. So we don't wanna leave money on the table. We wanna make sure that we get that final retainage payment. We get all the pending change orders seen through to completion, and we get paid for the work that we have done. So these are just, you know, some of the things that we need to make sure that we're that we're following up on. We need to be able to manage the schedule. We talked about managing the schedule and managing the resources on the schedule. Need to make sure that we're managing all that, that we can see the timeline. You know, we we have activities. You know, one activity could be could be linked to another activity. So when one moves, the other has to move with it. So you have, certainly, you know, successors and predecessors. I wanna be able to assign resources based on the duration of a task and the and the the work hours needed. I wanna be able to assign resources, and, ultimately, I wanna be able to see the schedule for all of my resources. So once again, having all this information in one place where I can go to something like the job dashboard and see all this, I think, is incredibly valuable. You know, I wanna see things. You know, we talk about building more and more AI, you know, into our solutions. I mean, you know, we we've we've had, you know, some form of that in in our solutions for quite some time. You know, when I could look at something like the troubleshooter, it's gonna tell me. It's gonna go through and find everything and put it into plain English for me and tell me you know, analyze the data for me. You know, I wanna go ahead and see, okay, where are we going running over budget? Where are we under budget? What you know, green versus red, good versus bad. We wanna see all these things, and we want the system to do that for us. And whether it's on demand as we ask for it or we can we have the ability to build in scheduled reports. Imagine having a report, whatever report that may be, whatever troubleshooter or whatever, you know, report automatically sent to the right people on on a regular basis. I mean, those are things that can be incredibly valuable for us as contractors. I mean, there's a, you know, a lot of things. I wanna go ahead and and real spend a few minutes here on the work in progress dashboard because I talked about how important that is. You know, if I look at the work in progress dashboard, you know, we started a very high level where I can see everything everything about the job, you know, or all the jobs in total. You know, I'm seeing the contract, the changeovers, the current contract. Certainly, I can put that in report mode as well. Remember, the key calculation here is the over under billing. Remember, over billing is not bad. Under billing, I I I think is a certainly not certainly not good for cash flow. There's no reason I shouldn't be billing for at least the amount proportionate to the work that I've completed. Overbilling is a good way to help with the cash flow because, you know, we're almost always, if not always, funding a job in the beginning. We we're spending money on labor and material long before we can even generate the first bill, much less get paid. But I wanna get that job to a at least a breakeven or a positive cash position as quickly as I can. But, you know, I and overbilling can give me a little bit of a a cash flow edge, but I gotta manage that. Those over underbilling need to be recorded in the financial statement. I cannot confuse overbillings with profit. So that's one of the things that the work in progress will help us do. But if we look at any one job, you know, it can be very easy to go in and put in projections. And whether I'm putting in you know, I I maybe I'm updating the percent complete. You know, I think on this particular task, I wanna update the percent complete, and I wanna I wanna put in some notations on, you know, why why we're why I I feel we are 50% complete. That could be one way to do it. You know, I can also go in, and I can update the dollars to complete. So think about it. I've got I've got a budget and I know what I've spent. So I need to tell it how much work I've done. Now I could tell it I've done 50% of the work, or I could tell it I'm not really sure how much work I've done, but I do know what it's gonna cost me to finish. So maybe I'm gonna come in and say, okay. It's gonna cost me, you know, $5,000, and I could certainly break that down into into, you know, material, labor, etcetera. But I could tell it what it's gonna take me to finish as of today. And either way, that's gonna go ahead and calculate my projected cost, my projected over or under on the budget, and all that carries forward to the work in progress schedule. So when I run that, the revised estimate is saying, okay. Your original estimate was $9.47. We think we're gonna get it done for $9.00 7. That's great. Our final profit our projected final profit now has has increased from what it from what it was originally. So that's certainly not a bad thing. Oh, you know, hopefully, that is a scenario, but there could be a scenario where it's the other way around where our, you know, our projected profit has gone down. So you're able to see that, you know, see the revised estimate, see the original profit, the final profit, and see where we stand, and all that's gonna carry forward to the the work in progress schedule, work in progress for one job or certainly run it across multiple jobs. If we're doing those cost projections, one thing that's I think is critical, if you're getting you know, if you're doing that maybe and maybe kinda newer to that process, I need to be able to to have a, you know, a baseline to compare it to. I need to be able to compare, for instance, today to where we were at the end of last month as an example or two months ago, whatever the two time periods are, and that will then call out any job that had a change. You know? Our estimated profit in this example went up by $51,000 because our estimated cost, we are forecasting to to go down by $51,000. So those are things that I wanna be able to track and monitor very quickly and easily. So the you know, we'll talk about a couple other things real quick. You know, for the sake of time today, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on any one of these areas. But, certainly, for those of you that have a service component to your business, you know, that's a a big part of maintaining your you know, managing your profits is managing that service work. I mean, a lot of times, you know, service work may be a small portion of the of the total book of work that you're doing, but it can be it can it can consume a lot of resources to manage that amount of work. So you wanna make sure that we can track that. We can enter enter service work orders when they come in. We can assign those to the service tech. You know, we can dispatch those out to the field. You know, I wanna assign a a ticket to bill. I wanna dispatch that out to the field and send that out to to the device in the field. So, once again, I won't spend a lot of time with service. Be more than happy to share more details about the service component of Computerease. We wanna make sure we pointed that out. Another thing I wanna talk about real quick, and then I'm gonna take a spend a few minutes looking at the, you know, one of our field solutions, and then we'll kinda come back in and wrap it all up. But, you know, it's really important that we are tracking our assets. One, maintenance and repair cost. So if I have a large equipment or just a fleet of vehicles, pickup trucks, service vans, etcetera, I need to be able to track maintenance and repair down to the individual asset level. I mean, I could have two very similar, if not identical, pieces of equipment or vehicles, maybe two pickup trucks. They're bought at the same time, but one of is one of them is costing twice as much a year to maintain than the other. I've got a problem I I need to address. You know? So, certainly, I wanna be able to very easily maintain maintenance records, service schedules. Then I also wanna be able to track where all the equipment is at, you know, if if whether it's small hand tools, large pieces of equipment. And you can see here in this example, I'm tracking everything from small hand tools, hammer drills, sawzalls, etcetera, tobaccos, bobcats, large pieces of equipment. I need to know where they're at, number one. But then number two, I need to be able especially on a larger equipment, I need to be able to allocate cost to the job for the time that our entire jobs used our own equipment. And, you know, the I I see unfortunately, I see too often where somebody will rent a piece of equipment for one job and charge that job because they got a an invoice from the rental company. And a very similar job that they use the same piece of equipment would have to be a piece of equipment they already own, so they didn't charge that job for the p for the use of their own equipment. Guess which job looked better from, you know, on when when you look at a job cost report? Well, and, you know, it's not fair, but the job that didn't get hit for the equipment cost is is likely going to look better than the job that did. Not a not a real good way to make sure that you have accurate job costing. So just a couple things that we wanna certainly keep in mind when we're talking about protecting profit margins. We gotta make sure we understand where you know, what our cost is and where that cost is coming from. So last but not least, and, you know, I wanna just kinda real quick when we talk about that real time job costing. And like I said, we got, you know, number of different time solutions depending on whether you you know, each individual is entering time on their, you know, on their smartphone, sending to somebody for approval, or maybe I'm a crew leader entering time for my crew. You know, I wanna be able to and I'll I'll well, I'll play the role here of a site superintendent, and maybe I'm entering time for my whole crew. Keep in mind, just as easily each crew member could put their time in, come to me for approval. But I'm gonna go ahead for the sake of time here today, put the time in for my crew. We're all working on job three seventy one on the electrical wall trim. You know, we we had our crew out there for eight hours today. I'd already built my crew of you know, I have my crew of five people. Maybe Craig left an hour early, so I'm gonna adjust that. And now I got thirty nine hours for my crew today that I'm gonna go ahead and submit back to the office. So site superintendent, I either just approved the time or entered and submitted the time for my crew. And then the other component that I wanna look at real quick is a lot of times, I am, as a site super, responsible for completing a daily field report, keeping a daily diary, my you know, what we'll call it a a daily log. And a lot of times when I ask people if they're doing that, they say, well, we should be, and then they pause. And what they're and what they wanna say is, but we don't have the right tool to do it. With this with solution like Computery, you certainly have the ability to do that. I I already entered the time for my crew today. So what makes it very easy to go and create my log entry, I'm gonna go ahead and create a log entry for today. We can have different log types. We'll focus on just the daily log, but you may have a safety incident, toolbox talk, work authorization log, whatever it may be. But I'm gonna go ahead. You know, I've already got the the employees. I can track the weather. I can track subcontractors that were out there. I can put my notes, you know, as far as the superintendent. I can upload pictures, etcetera, give you my story for today, upload any pictures. I can track, you know, units of production if I'm if I if I have a, you know, measurable unit that I'm tracking. I'm gonna go ahead and enter that information. I'm gonna go ahead and submit that back to the office. So we'll go back here in just a minute to the office and see what, see where all that lands. But keep in mind, in our field solutions, we can submit expense receipts. We can put in requests for additional material. We can approve invoices. We can view live job cost reports based on permissions. Keep in mind, everything we're doing is based on my permission settings, but we can view all that real time in the field. So I'm gonna go ahead and and go put my office hat back on here, come in out of the field. And now, you know, I've got the time they came in, you know, so I don't have to rekey any time. There's those thirty nine hours that came in. I'm gonna go ahead and bring the time in. You know, time is is accumulated, each day as we go through the week. You know, I've got the time that all comes in. There's the thirty nine hours that just came in for today. So we'll go ahead and save that, and we've got that entered for today. Now keep in mind, I've got a, you know, I've got a, a running report of all the time that's been entered but not yet processed. So at the end of the pay period, we'll be able to process that. But payroll is not gonna be until next week. But if we go back real quick and look at our job cost report, I wanna go back to that job. And we go back and look at that job, And guess what? Real time, when I drill down into the cost today, remember those that crew was working on the electric wall trim, there's the hours from today already reflected. The pending hours and cost already reflected in real time on my job cost report. That's what we mean when we talk about real time job costing. At the end of the week, I'll get my final proof report and then process payroll or submit to, you know, the computer's payroll service for processing. And then last but not least, you know, I did that daily field report. Well, as the project manager, I may have multiple jobs going on, and I got a couple different site superintendents sending me their information. I'm able to in that that log information, I'm able to look at that, drill down, see all the details, pictures, notes, the weather, you know, everything they want out in the field. So I have access to that. There's today's report, or I wanna be able to manage all the log entries for a particular job or for a particular date range, whatever that may be, but maybe I wanna see all the log entries for this job over a period of time. Well, it's gonna search and find all those entries, and I can go down and look at the details on any one entry. So when I get report that something happening on a happened on a job three weeks ago, three months ago, three years ago, I have all that information at my fingertips. So I know we covered a lot in a very short period of time. As I said, we're gonna launch a polling question here in just a minute. If you'd like to be contacted to learn more, we will certainly, be more than happy to do that and, and, you know, be able to kinda talk one on one on how this would actually work for your, you know, for your individual company. So with that, I'm gonna kinda go back here, follow-up with a couple closing slides, and then we'll launch one last polling question, see if you wanna be contacted to to certainly to discuss this in for in more detail. So, certainly, you know, we are invested in the construction industry. We are a big part of the construction industry. You know, we help, you know, build those construction accounting skills. We have our very popular Construction Accounting University, you know, where you can learn the ins and outs of construction accounting, you know, from you know, brought to you by people that understand your business. I gave you my background, but we have I have an entire team here with the at the Dell Tech Computeries business unit that has thousands of combined years of construction accounting experience. We continue to provide continuing education. You know, we wanna make sure we're bringing relevant topics, you know, that are relevant to anybody in in the industry, and and we have a lot of ongoing industry thought leadership that really gives you real world insights into what's going on in our industry. You know, certainly, you know, you know, we have a great reputation, which is built on the trust that we've, we've earned from, you know, from all of our existing customers. You know, we have a very high retention rate. You know, customers love the customer experience they have with us. We have some great reviews on many sites. You know, g two is one of the more popular sites today for reviews. So, you know, certainly, you can take my word and others others' word for it as well, but certainly encourage you to go out there and look at that. And just, you know, wanted to bring up here just a an example of a quote from one of our long time, you know, very happy Computore's customers. And just, you know, they they said they can't imagine not using computers. It's invaluable. You know, the the question was, how valuable is computers? And I said, well, I can't put a price tag on it because it's invaluable. I can't imagine running my business without that. And, you know, I think that's a that's a pretty good, you know, powerful statement from somebody. You know, the the the difference you know, I think the the big thing is we understand the construction industry. It's what we do. We wanna help you take control of your construction accounting. We'll allow you to clearly see job costing, protect your margins, make better business decisions, you know, proactive business decisions. You know, we have we have decades of industry experience. You know, we we give you access to all of our top all of our top people, all of that industry expertise. We were built for construction since day one. That's the only industry Computery serves as the construction industry. And, certainly, you know, we, you know, we we understand what it's like to to make a change, to move from, say, QuickBooks to Computeres. You know, we make sure that we have that process down. We make that as as easy and as quick as we possibly can for you. So I wanna get into just a couple questions before we wrap up here. While I do, I'm gonna go ahead and launch one last polling question. If you'd like to be contacted to learn more about Computerease, please go ahead and just check the yes box there. But while we do that, I'll go ahead and, take a couple questions that have come in from the audience here. See, we got a number of questions that came in. We're looking to move from Computerease I'm sorry. From QuickBooks to Computeres. Can you give us an idea on what the cost will be? So, yeah, that's really gonna depend on the number of users. That's something we will certainly reach out and talk to you, one on one about. So I I noticed a couple questions that come in about pricing and the the the timing to switch, so we'll certainly reach out and answer those, answer those for you. Got another question here. You know, how often do you recommend we put together a work in progress schedule? Great question. One I get asked all the time. I think if you're doing it any less frequently than monthly, it's not often enough. So, you know, I I, you know, I hope you're not doing it only when someone asks you for it. I hope you're not doing it only once a year or once a quarter or once or twice a year. I think I think best in class cadence is gonna is to prepare with schedule monthly, and we'd be more than happy to to talk about that in a little more detail. Currently use QuickBooks. Does your platform offer offer full range accounting? Yes. So everything we saw here plus all, certainly, the standard accounting functions, accounts payable, accounts receivable. That's all part of our solution. You know, we're gonna give you everything that QuickBooks does plus much, much more, especially when it comes to job costing and all those construction specific features that, you know, that, you you don't have with a generic solution like QuickBooks. We're currently using Computerease. We're interested in learning more about your project management, solutions. Yep. Certainly. We will reach out, and we can talk to you about that. I know we looked at that very briefly today. So, you know, certainly, we can reach out to you about that. Alright. With that, I think we're just about the top of the hour. So there's a few more questions we didn't get to. We will certainly follow-up with anybody we didn't get to, individually offline. But we with that, I wanna go ahead and certainly thank everybody for their time today. If you have any questions at all, you can certainly reach out to us, email us at [email protected], but we'd be more than happy to, answer any follow-up questions that any of you may have. So we'll, look forward to seeing you all on a webinar in the very near future, and we'll look forward to reaching out to a number of you that have, questions or ask us to do so. So thanks again. Everybody have a great day.