Your Job Management System

A Job Management System (JMS) is software developed to help teams manage a large volume of projects from bid requests through final payments. Our JMS is designed for speciality construction contractors such as electricians, roofers, and plumbers. It assists in the collaboration between estimators, project managers, foremen and office staff. Each team member can use the JMS to prioritize which jobs to estimate, schedule, complete, or bill. The JMS can also provide informative reports showing which customers or service lines deliver the most profitable work. 

The Workman’s Dashboard Workflow: Job Status Fields

The job status field is a critical piece of the Workman’s Dashboard software platform because it drives the whole workflow from beginning to end. It will keep your employees organized as each job proceeds through each step in your pipeline.

At the big picture level, each dashboard handles three top-level purposes and their associated statuses:

Sales & Estimating

• Request status
• Outstanding status 

Project Management & Scheduling

• Contracted status
• Proceed status
• Scheduled status

Accounting and billing

• Completed status
• Invoicing status
• Paid status

The sequence starts with a Request status. The phone rings or we get an email or web inquiry to prepare a bid. The customer is waiting for someone at our company to fulfill the request.

After a quote is submitted to the customer, it’s then an Outstanding bid.  The customer has the bid in hand, but it hasn’t progressed anywhere further down the sequence.

Once we have a contract, we can move it next to Contracted. Sometimes we might bypass this status as described below. Contracted means that we have a contract in hand, we know we are going to do the work, but for some reason we’re not ready to release it to the Project Manager for scheduling. There could be a number of things that might contribute to this — either on our end or on the customer’s end. In our asphalt contracting business, we typically ask for 50% upfront down payment. We will often have many jobs in Contracted where we’re just waiting for the customer to send us the funds to get started.

Likewise, there could be things that we must provide to the customer. For example, they might be asking for additional insured documents, a bond, W-9 form or any number of  other clerical things. We know that we are going to do the work at some point but we just aren’t quite ready to schedule dates on the calendar.

The Proceed status is just one subtle step further along than that. We now have everything situated and dates are ready to be put on the calendar. You may be familiar with the term “notice to proceed” that many government agencies use. Now we’re saying, “Go ahead project manager. Everything is ready. The customer is waiting for us to get them dates.”

Once we have dates we’ll move the job to Scheduled before and during the actual completion of the work. Pretty self-explanatory here.

The next three include Completed, Invoicing and Paid and relate to accounting functions. Once a job is moved to completed, it no longer appears on the project manager’s dashboard.

Completed means that the work is done in the field. Completed jobs are the list of “to do’s” that the accountant needs to fulfill. They need to send invoices out for all completed jobs.

Once the invoice has been created and sent to the customer, we’ll move it the Invoicing status. So we’ve completed the job, we’ve sent the bill, we just haven’t been just paid yet.

You guessed it, the next — and final — status is Paid and means that we’ve finally been paid in full.

We have another status, one that doesn’t fit into one of the top level categories It is the Rejected status, which is a job that does not make it’s way completely through the funnel. It’s the end of the road on a dead-end street. For example, if we prepare a quote for someone and it’s outright rejected somewhere in the sequence, we need a place to put those jobs to essentially cleared out of our workflow. It’s not gone forever. We are not deleting it from the system if it goes to rejected but we’re basically just taking it off of anybody’s dashboard if it goes there.

Finally, we will explain how each of the dashboards are influenced by these statuses.

In addition to the status field, each job also has a required role for the following: Estimator, Project Manager, Foreman and Accountant. Someone from your company will be assigned for each of these functions. It could be the same person for an owner-operator or very small company.  Or it could be a $100 million company with tens of project managers and estimators. There’s really no limit.

The dashboards will show things that are relevant for each user at their part of the funnel. This allows each user to only be concerned with the part of the company that they are responsible for and allows a separation of duties to be incorporated into your workflow. Even for the very small company where people are wearing multiple hats, the system allows users to batch their activities which generally means greater efficiency.

Likewise, the system allows tremendous oversight for senior managers to see how each employee is performing and if any items are getting neglected.

This is a quick overview of the status and dashboard functions within Workman’s Dashboard. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to email or call!