Profit Starts in the Field: How HeavyJob Helps You Win More and Waste Less

Everybody for joining us. I know we're going have some people still trailing in here over the next couple of minutes and probably throughout the webinar, but we've got a lot of ground to cover and I want to make sure that we take advantage of the time that you guys are setting aside to join us today. So we're going to go ahead and jump in. First thing I did want to do though is introduce you to those of us who are going to be, kind of talking at you today. Unfortunately, we won't have the opportunity to really make this super conversational, with the attendees today because of so many people here and so many different interests, but, definitely want to show you a lot of value in HeavyJob. This will be, pretty dynamic, right? So we're gonna take some polls as we go through, ask you guys a little bit about where your concerns are, what you want to see, steer the webinar a little bit as we do that, and we'll actually pull up software. It won't just be a slideshow presentation the whole time, and of course engage a little bit with you guys directly through the Q and A. So to introduce myself, I am Taylor Pruitt. I have, kind of made a strange career to get here, to be honest with you. I started I went to school at Auburn. I've got a actually a master's in industrial engineering from Auburn, but, have never used it because while I was in school there, I decided to take a job working for a construction software company and, kind of fell in love with it. Graduated, didn't do anything with the engineering degree, kept working for construction software company. Worked there for four or five years before I moved out here to Houston and took a job with HCSS, where I have been for the last seven and a half to eight years, kind of in the middle of that range. Mostly working with our customers around the southeast over that time. So since about twenty twenty, Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia has kind of been the area that I've worked with most, but work a little bit more with our companies all up and down the East Coast and occasionally with others across the country. So I'm here to kind of guide you from the HCSS side today. And then we also have Evan here as a special guest and I'll introduce himself. Oh, hey, special guest. Thank you for that. That's very kind. My name is Evan Bryant. I work for RDJE Incorporated. We're an underground utility installation company. We mostly do work for municipalities, not a lot of private work or subdivision, but that's what we do. I'm an estimator project manager here. I've been in estimating and project management for about twenty six years. I graduated from Georgia Tech and started with estimating for a large asphalt company. I also worked in asphalt for, oh gosh, nineteen years or so. Actually, when I started working, the version of HCSS was DOS based. So I've been using HCSS products for quite a while. It was HeavyBid way back then, so I'm used to the function keys on the keyboard still. So I guess what that means is I'm old. But I'm excited about kind of the way things are going and the direction that HCSS products are going and how they can help as companies grow and step into the future with technology. I've had the privilege of working with Evan and the RDJE team over the last few years and have really seen, even though they've been with us for quite a while, Their commitment over the last few years, especially in really embracing technology and making the most out of the tools that they have. It's not an overnight process. Definitely still some things being worked on, but I think Evan and his experience going through that, as fresh as it is, as well as just the overall experience with software and tools, not just HCSS, but, a little bit broader scope on that too, will be the, you know, the more anecdotal touch that a lot of you are looking for today and hopefully relate to some things that you know you're seeing in your companies and your businesses that we can really help you out with. And so to really open it up, here's what we're going to cover today. We've got a few objectives and it'll be somewhat structured as we go through today, of moving through these. The main thing I want to start with is if you're not familiar with HeavyJob to a really intimate degree, you might have different expectations on what HeavyJob is or what it's supposed to do for you. I would tell you that if you ask me, the first thing I'll tell you is that it is a job costing and project tracking solution. It will help you get better visibility into your real time job costs, including your labor, your material equipment, your production quantities, how you're performing on that project. It does do time cards. It does do, you know, document control. There's a lot of other project management functionalities that come along for the ride with HeavyJob. But at its core, understanding where you're making and losing money is really what I would tell you HeavyJob's all about. So that's our number one objective today is to show you how it can help you with that. We're also gonna talk about streamlining some of that billing process, help you get paid faster, spend less manual time putting that together. Integrating HeavyJob with payroll. The accounting team is always a pretty pivotal group when it comes to evaluating field tools and job costing tools and things like that, making sure we keep them happy and that we have smooth integration with your accounting and payroll team. And then how to use some of this data we're capturing in HeavyJob to not just help us keep track of our jobs, but actually improve our bidding process to improve accuracy on the estimating side. And then overall just kind of empowering people to make better decisions and more informed decisions with that data. So from a conversational standpoint, we're gonna dive into number one. We're gonna start out with a poll here. And I'm just kind of curious to know this will be your opportunity to steer a little bit of the conversation. Those of you attending today, where would you say your biggest job costing headaches today are coming from? And while you guys are kinda looking, there should be a poll that's popped up, as part of the Zoom menu that you can submit your answer there and actually contribute to, to the webinar. Evan, while that's happening, I kinda wanna turn it over to you and maybe flip the question on its head because you guys are using HeavyJob and so I hope you're not having too many headaches with job costing. Right. I'm gonna ask you where, from your perspective and your role at the company, where do you think that HeavyJob is having the most benefit to you when it comes to job costing? Well, I think what it's doing is it's helping us customize the way we look at the cost coding structure. Kind of in the past, when we first adopted HeavyJob, the estimators that were estimating projects and putting them out to HeavyJob, there was a lot of different philosophies on how to cost code. And so people codes were being made on the fly. Things were being brought in with different ways that individuals wanted to track the data. What we found over four or five years of that is we had a jumbled mess of information coming into account. And so as we were trying to find historical data about, hey, what does this project look like? We're going to bid another one. What can we learn from the last one? We were finding that the data was skewed because it was tracked differently. So we started to kind of tweak the way we looked at HeavyJob and tried to find more consistency in our coding structure, so that as we were tracking this, we were able to track it consistently from crew to crew and job to job. I had a conversation with one of my foremen one time. He said he had to be prepared for the job that he was going to. And he wanted to know who the project manager or the estimator was so he knew how to track the job because he knew everybody had a different way of thinking. And I thought, wow, that's pretty telling that he's thinking he not only has to worry about the job, but he has to worry about how he's given the data back to the office for the particular person he's working with. So it kind of started a conversation on our end of like, how can we fix that so that our guys are confident that no matter who they're working for, whichever project manager or estimator they're dealing with, that it's consistent? So HeavyJob has the ability is there. We just weren't utilizing it, you know, to full potential. So we kind of changed the way we looked at the way we tracked time, cost codes, T and M work, you know, things like that, and said, hey, let's make it consistent. It's there to be done. Let's use what we have. And it's really helped kind of hone in on consistent production data, cost data, and issues that we see in the field. So it took getting started and working through it and using the product, but then realizing, okay, it's going to take us working at it to make it better. So it's been, I would say, four or five years in the process, and we're just starting to get some of the benefits of that. For you guys in particular, when you started going down that route and figuring out, hey, we needed to standardize this, did that start more kind of on the accounting side of things? Did it start on the estimating side of things? Was it chicken and an egg kind of situation? It both with accounting and estimating. What we realized is our accounting software was tracking a million codes because somebody would make a code on the fly because it was something that wasn't matching up from, you know, a particular project. And what we ran into is, hey, we need to standardize the coding that we have in accounting and in a HeavyBid. We realized the best information we can get from the field started with a solid estimate. And HeavyBid has that ability. And I don't want turn this into a HeavyBid, you know, But what we found is we needed to start the process in the beginning with HeavyBid so that as it's transferring data from HeavyBid to accounting and then out into HeavyJob, it was consistent. And so the kind of the philosophy was the same. So we had to go through and say, okay, what codes do we want? How granular do we want the detail? That was really what it boiled down to. And what we realized is we needed to make it easier for the guys in the field to search their list of cost codes because they're trying to build stuff. I mean, ultimately, the end of the day, they're working. They're building and making money for the company through their efforts. And we don't need them searching fifty two cost codes to find out if they're doing, you know, eight inch pipe or six inch pipe or twenty four inch pipe backfill or whatever. So we had to go through our accounting and our HeavyBid and realize what we need to do to make it cleaner. So those guys in the field aren't burdened with finding data and ideas and then feeling like they were doing the wrong one. And then with too many options, you get too many wrong data sets that come in. And then as a project manager, you're going through trying to analyze or reject time cards. And so we we plan things up to make it easier for our guys in the field, and it's really helped. And that that answer kind of fits in with my personal philosophy when it comes to job costing as well. So I I appreciate you agreeing with me without knowing it there. But that's again, we yeah, this is a HeavyJob webinar. We're not gonna turn this into HeavyBid. You will hear me mention HeavyBid a few times throughout the process because there's some benefits you can get to having HeavyBid and HeavyJob integrated. This is a, you know, HCSS products. That is one of the benefits of working with HCSS is having different parts of your company and different tools that all integrate and tie together and have a nice workflow. But a lot of people that I end up talking to that come to me looking for help with their job costing and their project tracking aren't ready for HeavyJob because they don't have an estimating process in place that spits out standardized budgets and spits out information that they can actually track against. Their problem is that they can't track because they don't have the information to track against. They don't know what they're capturing. They don't know what they're looking for. And I don't know if the attendees can actually see the poll results here, but we did close the poll and fifty percent of you said that option A, getting timely and accurate field data was your biggest headache. And then forty four percent of you said multiple or all of the above. So almost the entire webinar said that either multiple of these or specifically accurate field data was the biggest headache. So I think that probably gives us a good transition here to start talking about some of the ways that HeavyJob can handle that. And along the lines of, Evan, what you were just talking about, kind of make sure that those problems don't create themselves as that data is being captured and things are standardized. So I'm actually gonna pull up my iPad here and dive into the software for the first time, in our webinar. And let me get my iPad connected. We've been yapping a little too long and it's disconnected. So, let me get that done here. There we go. And so this is the field app. So HCSS field. HeavyJob is included in this. If you guys end up using our safety program, our plans, anything else, a lot of our mobile apps are all included in this one field app. So it is not HeavyJob per se, but it is our field app that includes HeavyJob capabilities. And there are other project management documentation tools, diaries, photos. I'm not gonna go into that right now. The time cards really where I wanna focus since that is what the poll question and kind of what this objective is about. And just want to say that we do our best to really make this a field focused foreman friendly application. Everything starts with the boots on the ground. If they're not wanting to use this, if they're not able to use this, then nothing that you're getting coming into the office matters because it's going to be incomplete or incorrect. So we take a lot of effort to really focus on the field users and the foreman first, which I would say is a pretty big difference from people that I talked to that are trying to use an accounting systems field tool. Whether it's you know, we work with just about any accounting system out there. I know some popular ones with Viewpoint, with Foundation, with ComputeEase. Kind of get the same feedback from most of them is that it's a tool built by an accounting program for accounting people. We try to focus and make this as easy as possible for the field users. So I'm gonna come out here and I won't have time to go into every single detail and button out here. So I'm gonna I'm gonna show you some automation, show you some things. If you've got questions about where this is set up or where it comes from, the the point of this is to see if you guys are interested enough to schedule a a more personal conversation and just get you exposed to HeavyJob. So what I'm gonna do is start by auto filling my time card with some data that we've already put in a crew that we've worked with before and just say, hey, look, here's my standard crew. Here's the cost codes that we last worked on on this project. Twenty four inch pipes and flared end sections. We're going to do some utility work today. And from a field user standpoint, there's three main things that the holy trinity that I call them of data capture here is we need labor hours, we need equipment hours and we need production quantities. I'll tell you right now, if you don't care to capture that or you don't wanna capture that, HeavyJob not for you. I've also got other questions for you, but not the time or place. So labor hours, equipment hours, production quantities and in terms of entering that it is touchscreen, right? We're on an iPad, we're on a mobile device. I can go through and say, Andy worked six hours here. Andres worked four hours here, whatever it might be. We can take some shortcuts. If there's, you know, the entire crew work together, I can just say, cool. Everybody worked six hours here on this next cost code. Everybody worked four hours here. We had a ten hour day split pretty evenly. We're good to go. Evan, you mentioned having too many options and too many choices of cost codes and things like that can be problematic. Well, if I want to customize my cost codes here, click my add cost code button. This list of cost codes is a job specific list. So when you create the budget in HeavyJob, whether that's exported from HeavyBid or imported from Excel or manually created, however you guys are doing that, only the job specific cost codes are going to show here. And there's other tools that you can do. I always say there's a trade off. You can give your PMs a little bit more work on the the manager side of HeavyJob to set up the project and make it even easier for your foreman. So I could even narrow this list down to only the two or three cost codes that we're working on this week and next week so that they cannot screw it up. Right? They're only able to choose the cost codes that they're supposed to be working on. And then, you know, they tap the cost code and add it or they drag to remove it. And that can be managed pretty easily. There are labor rates and equipment rates already set up for each of these resources. So there is a cost already applied in HeavyJob to these six hours, to these four hours that we now know the labor cost for the day, the equipment cost for the day. And then the production quantities up here really the only other things that, that I'll say we require are really demand from you on the HeavyJob side. And so if I tap on this entry, this is gonna take us to a new screen where we can put quantities in. And so I'm gonna say, yeah, we got, I'll just pick a number, fifty feet of pipe installed today. I'll click over here to my next cost code and we got, two flared end sections installed. And really from a data entry standpoint, there's more that you can do but it can be that quick to get all of your labor hours, equipment hours and production quantities in. And for those of you that are still using paper or, you know other sort of digital forms or Excel spreadsheets, there's gonna be a little bit of a lag time to get this information to the field or to the office. From a HeavyJob standpoint, as soon as I've done this, I can hit send provided I'm connected to the Internet, it'll send immediately. If I'm not connected to the Internet, you can still use this, but obviously you can't send data until you are. And that's as easy as it has to be. And can I jump in for one more Yeah? Was gonna prompt you. I figured you had something to Yeah. So if you click back on the top there and open up the place where you punch in your production quantities, there's a tab over to the right that says estimate notes. One of the things that we're finding that we're wanting to do is share the information that the estimator had looking at the bid with the guys in the field. So there's not this disconnect between us and them. So that, you know, what we want to do is somehow be able to tell the guys in the field, hey, this is what we were thinking when we bid the project, so that they can either agree or disagree and have a conversation of, hey guys, y'all really missed this one. But at least this estimate notes, when you're integrating with HeavyBid and other systems, those notes come over from the estimate so that you can say, hey, the guy was thinking we need these resources at these productions or whatever. It helps the guys in the field feel connected to the project to say, Okay, I'm on track, or Wait a minute, I don't feel equipped to do what they're thinking we should do for this production quantity. And it starts this conversation of information that goes back and forth that only makes the job and the bid better for the next time. And so this product, you know, HeavyJob is good for tracking, but it also helps close the gap between the office and the field so that ultimately the company can be more successful at the next project as well. That's spot on. And with this, again, there's probably people in here that don't have HeavyBid. Maybe this makes you interested a little bit more in HeavyBid, but, you can put notes in manually if you're not using HeavyBid. Not a lot of people do it because it is, you know, time consuming and a little more cumbersome to do it. If you're estimating this work through HeavyBid, we talked about that standardization. These notes will come over automatically to the cost codes and to the field users. So they can see you know, what the target production rate is. You know, if you work a ten hour shift, one hundred and ten feet of pipe in a shift is how we did this job. And we bid it with this crew. This is the equipment you should have. This is how many laborers you should have. Make sure that everything's lined up. At HCSS, we are very much, pro empowering your foreman with knowledge, with information, making sure that they feel some ownership of the job, that they feel, involved in the job and can be your first line of defense. I mean, they're the ones out there working every single day. The project managers are hopefully staying on top of the projects, having conversations, looking at daily diaries coming in and things like that. But there's always a little bit different perspective from the people that are out there boots on the ground doing the work day to day. And so this actually pairs really nicely with one of the other tools that we have here from the job costing and daily reporting side is once I filled out this time card, I can go down to this reports button at the bottom, do a time card analysis, and as a foreman, pretty much get an instant feedback on how I did today. And so what this is gonna do is actually use your budget information, your production rates that you have built into this job's budget and say, hey, look, based on the number of labor hours that you spent today, the number of man hours on your time card, we expected you to get fifty five feet of pipe installed and a little over two in sections. You said you got fifty feet. You said you got two feet or two in sections. Little bit behind, right? We didn't quite hit our production targets. Maybe there's a good reason for it. Maybe we got a late start. Maybe this is the first day we worked on this and we're still ramping up a little bit. Maybe there was some weather other issues, whatever that might be. But if I'm looking at this as a foreman and seeing that I've missed my target by a decent margin and I don't think I can do much better. I can be that first line of defense to say, well, hey look, something's wrong here. Let me back up. Let me go over to those estimate notes that Evan was just talking about. And just first of all, double check, make sure that I've got the right crew here, the right equipment. Maybe I've got a three twenty out here instead of a three fifty, right? Maybe this was bid with a D six and I've got a D four or maybe I'm supposed to have an extra laborer. I can initiate that conversation with a project manager whoever else now and say, you know, hey guys, we're not gonna make progress on this. We're not gonna hit our targets. We're going to lose money or dig into our profit margins if we don't correct this. So what do you want to do? Do you want to get me a different piece of equipment out here tomorrow? Do we just need to update our forecast to where we know we're going to lose a little bit of money here and we got to find out where to make it up later? Those are conversations that can start immediately as soon as a day's work is done. Right. And two or three more days of doing this could be the difference in making money and losing money on the project. And that's the real time data that we try to get back. You don't have to wait for a week's worth of time cards to be brought into the office or sent them to the office, reviewed, compiled, exported to accounting or entered into accounting before you can start running these P and L reports or job cost reports and see, you know, the warning signs and the red flags. This information is here immediately even to the guys in the field. And then of course in the office, we can go look at a little bit of that in a second. One more thing I wanted to show on the time card here. And that's really just about, you know, we have the ability to capture this data. It's easy enough to use. A lot of people are worried about adoption. Can my guys pick this up? First of all, I'd say that I've never met a foreman that if they're willing to learn this can't learn this. It's pretty straightforward. I tell people all the time. We've got thousands of companies across North America using our software. Do you think that your foreman are stupider than all those other thousands of companies? Because I don't. Don't know your foreman but I don't think so. And so when I go to send this, I'm actually gonna do something intentional here. I'm gonna forget to put a production quantity in. We have what we call time card warnings. And these are great for the life of HeavyJob, but especially when people are learning how to use this and maybe they don't have the muscle memory, they don't have the retention down yet. When I hit send on this time card, it's gonna check any number of things for me. There's about twenty, twenty five different time card warnings that you can turn on or off and choose how to handle these. But some things that I'm supposed to do that I haven't, I haven't done my diary for today. I forgot to put a production quantity in for this cost code. I didn't capture meter readings for my equipment, which we can also do daily through HeavyJob. And then I'm supposed to be getting employee signatures for this so that they can sign off on time. We don't have any payroll disputes, things like that. I haven't done any of that. And so not only does it remind me, but if I just tap on the notice, it actually takes me directly to the place where I'm supposed to do that. So I don't have to remember all the paths and buttons, things like that and say, oh yeah, here's where I do it. I've got two of these. Great. Now that warning's gone and I can take care of the rest. So it's not only a great tool to make sure it's easy to capture this information, but the data integrity and the quality of the data that you're getting the first time from the field should be improved immediately by using HeavyJob because you'll see I've got an ignore button down here. You can make these hard stops, and make it to where you can't submit the time card until you fix it. That's a slightly different conversation. Some consulting that might come in there on whether that's a good or a bad idea, but, you know, I've at least acknowledged this and say, I'm not doing that today. I've got a good reason for it. I'm gonna go ahead and send this out. So, I'm gonna hop really quickly back to the office side and talk about the job costing. Just by the way, I know we've got four or five objectives here. We're almost halfway through this hour. This definitely is the bulk of the time we're gonna spend. Some of the other ones are quick hitters. So I do wanna start to wrap up the job costing side, but as I mentioned, HeavyJob, if I can pick one thing that it does, this is it. So I wanna make sure that we're spending adequate time on this. And so on the dashboard, this is the home screen of the web portion of HeavyJob. There's the mobile app and then there's this web portion where all the project management, the billing, the payroll integrations, things like that happen. And first and foremost on the dashboard, I can see all my active projects. I can see our job to date variance. Just bottom line, here's where we're at. We're in the green on all these because we're using HeavyJob and it's great. And so the Braze Bayou expansion, if I click on it, I get one layer deeper deeper of information down here. So instead of job level, we get cost type level. So we've got our labor budget, our equipment budget, material budget, etcetera. I can see where we're really shining and where we're, you know, maybe not doing so great. Equipment is easily where we're making most of our money on this job. And then some trends, The last fourteen days, sometimes you'll look at this and instead of all this green, you'll see the last two or three days start to show a red trend. We've lost money on those days. I might see that and visually say, let's go check that if my foreman hasn't, you know, told me anything about the production issues or anything like that. Because there's always the chance that we're hitting our production targets but still losing money if we're not using the right resources or using more expensive resources or we just didn't bid the job right. Right? So got some visibility here. But then if I go into the full project overview, this is where you get that budget level, cost code level detail of, you know really what we're looking for on a job. So I can see every cost code that we've got in this budget, kind of that same level variance. I've got mine sorted, works the best. I like to see the problem areas when I come in here. And I can see that you know there's nothing too bad. This clearing grub cost code is definitely my problem area. Budgeted twenty seven thousand dollars for it, spent about thirty five on a two point three million dollar job. That's not a huge percentage of the project, but it is a pretty big percentage in terms of the overage here. So I might be a little concerned about this thinking if Clear and Grub is a hundred and fifty thousand dollar cost code on my next job and we're twenty five percent over, that's a much bigger deal than this seven grand that I've got right here. So where did we miss out? I can break this down into the labor equipment material components just like the other reports and say, you know, okay, on the labor side of things, four thousand seven hundred of that overage came here. And it's what I consider just generally a production issue. Whether that's on the estimating side or the field side, I don't know yet. But we budgeted three hundred and eighty hours for this task. We spent four hundred and seventy two man hours. Anytime you have that kind of overage, you're you're gonna be upside down on that cost code more often than not. And I'm going jump in right here. I'll say, at this point where you're trying to analyze what code is causing you problems, if you have too many cost codes and the foreman is getting overwhelmed with the dropdown menu. I heard somebody say one time that after about eight choices, people give up. And so what the tendency is, is they open it up and they go, yeah, I think we were clearing a grubby. And they put too much labor to the wrong item because there's too many choices and they kind of get tired. And so building a good budget maximizes what you're seeing here. Because if you start to realize, wait a minute, I've got way too much labor in this item, and then you start to look down and go, well, I don't have any labor in what they should have been doing. It also shows you, wait a minute, our guys are coding things to the wrong spot. And then you can have the conversation of, hey guys, don't forget, this is what we're expecting, and you can have some conversation. But this dashboard helps you realize something doesn't look right. Why is that? And then you can drill down and then realize either it's an estimating or it's just a clerical, you know, hey guys, here's let me coach you into the right way of tracking this and then it may make it easier for everybody in the field. Absolutely. And I my examples that I have here are a little more sophisticated in terms of how detailed we get with our cost codes and our budget. A lot of our customers, especially those just starting out with the philosophy of of job costing this way, might have five or six cost codes that they you know across an entire job. They summarize it a lot more. We've got site work. We've got excavation. We've got storm and sewer. You know we've got paving and it's just big general buckets that people are putting time and equipment hours towards. You lose a little bit of granularity on how it compares to your estimates and a little bit of insight as to where specifically you're making or losing money. But it's a great first step that's still going to give you, in most cases, than what you have today. And you can grow with the program and start to get more sophisticated once your people have kind of mastered the five cost codes, right? So from a job costing standpoint, this is the heart of what we're looking at here. Plenty of other reports that could go into production and, you know, cost per unit analysis and stuff like that. We may end up pulling those up as, as we go through. But, I'm gonna kind of retire the job costing conversation there and start to move on more to the billing, payroll, some of the other objectives we have today to make sure that we, you know, we don't lose time for that. So let me hop us back over to our presentation and if you guys haven't noticed yet, we've got some slides here that actually show some of the things we've already talked about. I'm much more of a do it live, show the actual software. I'm not a big slideshow person so I'll probably have to skip through a couple of these slides that I'm supposed to talk about on the presentation and end up doing it live. I think most people probably prefer that. So I'm going to assume that we're good there. But we do have another question to kind of steer the conversation here and this one is about the billing process. So again, we'd like to hear from you guys. With your current billing process, what is keeping you guys from getting paid? What is slowing that down the most? Is it waiting on time cards to come in from the field? Is it actually compiling that data, your production quantities and and the work completed from those time cards, on a monthly or weekly basis? Is it T and M tracking? Are you guys doing a lot of T and M work and that's really difficult for you to keep up with and make sure you're getting paid for all of that? Or is it change order documentation? Those are all things that we hear very commonly. Sorry we didn't give you a multiple or all the above option on this one. I feel like that might be popular too. But if we could take a second to answer that and Evan, kind of as we did before, I mean, I guess I'll turn it over to you. I don't know how involved you are with the accounting side of the process here, but any I'll I'll leave the the floor wide open to you on the billing side of things. I'll say one of the benefits we found with HeavyJob is, in the line of work that we do, we are on call contractors for municipalities when there is a sewer waterline break or or problem. So we can get a call at seven o'clock at night from a local municipality that says, Hey, we've got a busted water pipe because the ground's frozen. And all of a sudden we're mobilizing. With the tracking in HeavyJob, we can track it as a T and M job. And from the time we start moving resources, we can track our cost and everything that's there so that as we're working through the night, as you're gathering things, as you're getting extras, because you don't really know what you're up against, The T and M tracking feature allows us to capture all of the labor and equipment and materials that go to that job so that days later, when you're trying to let the dust settle and it's fixed and the panic is over. Okay, we've got the system back in operation. Now what did we do? The T and M tracking function on HeavyJob allows us to say, Oh yeah, we had a lowboy driver. We had an extra guy standing by at the yard. You know, all of those things come in, and instead of trying to remember, because you've got a superintendent that was up all night, now he's asleep during the day, so I can't remember what he did. And you're trying to gather all this stuff up instead of this anecdotal, Yeah, I think I was here and there. HeavyJob tracks it. And you can either set the job up from the start to track at T and M, or there's a button on there that says, Hey, from this point forward, everything I put in here, put it in a T and M report. And then that way you can spit it out to the owner and say, Look, Mr. Owner, Mrs. Owner, this is all of the resources we did, plus our profit. You know, we expect to get paid for jumping through the hoops in the middle of the night. And ultimately, that's what we want to do. We're going to take care of a customer and fix a problem, we want to be paid appropriately. And this way is a transparent way of saying, here's what we've done. Just pay us for what we put in the ground because there's no time for an estimate. There's no time for a budget review. It's, hey, there's water coming out of the ground. Fix it. And this helps tremendously in organizing that and getting everybody on the same page from the people in the field all the way to your owner that's going to write the check for the repair. Totally. Well, have a feeling that's going to be relevant to most of the answers we get here, but let's take a look. This one's pretty evenly split actually. So we've got, about a quarter of the audience that said waiting on time cards to come in. Little over a third that said compiling monthly, weekly quantities, thirty six percent of y'all there. Twenty seven percent on T and M tracking and then nine percent on change order documentation. So, a little bit of everything. Again, as I would probably assume, sounds like compiling those quantities is the slight leader in the clubhouse in terms of, where most of you are having your earliest biggest headaches, but we'll cover all these, to some degree right now. So waiting on time cards to come in, I I don't really think that there's a whole lot we need to talk about there. I kinda showed you the submission process in HeavyJob and how those time cards are filled out. As soon as those time cards are done, they hit send that comes into the the manager system. And things like that dashboard, those job cost reports and any other reports that we have in HeavyJob. That's the beautiful thing about it is nobody has to touch that data again. The time cards are entered in the field. That is the the point of entry. And then they send that data to the manager system. All of those reports are automatically generated and that information is used to generate reports that we know you're going to want. Nobody has to extract that information, manipulate it, summarize it, do anything else with it. So waiting on time cards to come in is there and then compiling those quantities. I'll actually give you the kind of workflow here. But this is one of my favorite pieces of HeavyJob because it boils down to getting you paid, right? That's we do the work to get paid. And if you do the work and you're struggling to prove that you did the work or to get paid for the right amount, it becomes very frustrating very fast and it's not good for anybody. So here within HeavyJob, if we go into the billing module, we do have a separate module for T and M. So I'll allude back to what Evan talked to, here in a second and say how we track T and M and and how you can bill for that. But it's gonna build off of the progress billing. I can come into the progress billing section here in HeavyJob. And within about thirty seconds, I'm gonna be able to go in here and say, okay, I want to generate my monthly progress bill for this Braze Value expansion job. Right? So I'm gonna say generate it for the current month. I know we're not quite done yet, but I'll do this and just quick new bill. This has already been generated for me when I came in here because I've got some some automation going. But what's gonna show, let me hide a few of these columns that we don't necessarily need to make life a little easier for us. I'm gonna have all my pay items that I've set up on this project and it's gonna automatically find every time card that's been submitted in this date range for this project, take the quantities from those cost codes that we've set up in our budget and those pay items and automatically summarize them into the period quantity. So in October for this project, we have done three point two five acres of clearing. We have, removed almost eighteen thousand cubic yards of rock, stockpiled twelve and a half thousand cubic yards of topsoil and removed another five thousand five hundred cubic yards of unsuitable clay. So without having to do anything, because we have this in a database, because the time cards are being entered from the field, assigned to cost codes, assigned to dates, HeavyJob can go ahead and do that for you and say, hey, here's what you've done this month. Here's what you should be paid for based on your records. And let me let me say one thing to kind of go back to this. I wonder if some people are thinking, well, what if I turn in the wrong information on the time card? Do I get one shot at it? Once I hit send, is that over? The answer is no. You can continually submit the time card, and it basically lays a copy over the next one. So that if a foreman makes a mistake and forgets to put something, it's not a one shot deal. There's the ability to resubmit, update, and keep things going in so that it's not, you don't have to worry that, Oh, I'm not good with computers. I'm going screw this up. You can't screw it up. You can submit it and keep submitting so that if you call and go, Hey, I need some more information for a bill that doesn't look right, oh yeah, they can submit it again. So I know sometimes there's this this trepidation of like, ah, I don't want to screw this up. You can't necessarily screw it up. I mean, it's designed so that you can easily get your information turned in so that you don't feel like you have to be in a rush to do it, you know, all at one time. That's a good point because there are a couple of different pieces and places that you can take care of that, right? So if a foreman submits a time card, there is a review and approval process here in HeavyJob that we might touch on in the payroll section here in a But to make sure PMs, accounting, whoever else needs to put eyes on that can actually validate it before we send this off to accounting and payroll. If the payroll run has already been done for the week, you know, you probably don't wanna be going back and adjusting time cards like hours necessarily from the previous week. There's options to do that, but most of our customers lock that down once it's been sent to payroll. But from a quantity standpoint, we do have a quantity adjustment tool built into the system. So you don't even have to necessarily go back and adjust a time card. We know there's gonna be times when people have to eyeball something and they don't get the quantity just right. And after five days of eyeballing something, they realize that they've been five percent low on it every single day, and they're two hundred yards or, you know, however many feet short at the end of the week of what they reported, well, we can fix that. You know, you don't even have to go into each individual time card. You can go into our quantity section here and just make a quantity adjustment for that as a ledger entry pretty much and say, hey, we didn't get a thousand feet done. We got twelve hundred feet done. Let me just correct that. And now that entry is there as kind of an audit trail. That is your new job to date quantity. And you don't have to worry about going into every individual time card and trying to figure out which day you got it wrong. So lots of options for you there, but assuming that you've gotten it right at this point through any means of those reviews and and other processes, we say, hey, here's what we've gotten done. We have a contract in the system with unit prices for each of these pay items. So we know what you should get paid for these. So we're actually going to Well, real quick, of course you have the ability to say, hey, the requested quantity is what we've done. The owner approved quantity may be something different. So if the owner approves less than what you think you should get paid for through that process, that unapproved quantity is going to carry over to the next bill. The next monthly progress bill make sure that that is not forgotten and included here in the calculated quantity. So you can see here, this happened to me last month. I am actually billing for thirty eight acres of clearing even though this month we've only completed three and a quarter presumably because thirty five acres were completed in August or September and they didn't get approved for one reason or another. So we're gonna try again. We're gonna say, hey, we've done the work. Pay us for it. So now that we've done that, I can actually go and create an invoice for this, which now puts the dollar amounts towards those quantities. So again, here's what's been approved by the owner. Here was our unit price. If we've got, you know, obviously a unit price contract here where we've got, an agreement to be paid per cubic yard, per acre, etcetera. And so this is what the dollar value of the work we've completed comes out to. And we can't generate an actual AIA form from HeavyJob, but we can kick this out to Excel in pretty much the same format that most of you are gonna be looking for. Always a gamble on which screen this Excel file is gonna open up on. So let me find it. There we go. And so some of you will be able to take this exactly as it is and submit this for, you know, for payment. Others will probably need to recreate this in your accounting system or an AIA format document, whatever it might be. But I've talked through this a little bit, so we've slowed it down just a hair but frankly, within a minute or maybe two, you can go in and generate a progress bill for the quantities that have been completed over the course of any date range. Generate a document like this so that then you can just copy and paste this or reenter it into whatever format you need. Instead of having to spend all the time going through time cards, manually compiling it, trying to figure out what's actually been completed so that you know what you're supposed to be paid on. So hopefully that process looks as seamless and quick for all of you as as I think it should. There's really not any extra time to cut out of it at that point. So, this is how you make sure you get paid for what you guys have completed. As long as that data is being entered in the field and reviewed and approved properly, this is gonna be cake for you. Do I have anything to add to that? Are you guys I know you guys are in the process of, you know, converting to HeavyJob. One of the things I'll say is as a hurdle that we've had to overcome in the billing quantities is the philosophy of how we track certain items. So that, for example, when we're laying a sewer line and we have a manhole that we have to put in, what we have to coach our foreman on is just because you work on laying the line through the base of the manhole and you haven't done the invert yet, you haven't stacked it out yet, put the top on, don't, we have to ask them how we want to track that quantity of one or whatever, so that we don't say, well, I worked on this one manhole for three days, so I'm going to put a quantity of one for each day. Well, what ends up happening if we're not careful is when we come to generate a report like this, it says we did three manholes, when actually we just spent three days on one manhole. So one of the hurdles we're working through is how to coach our guys to make sure the data that we get is what we need and not a little off. So there is a little bit of thought process. We're working through that. But once you start to do this and you see how powerful this tool is in helping you generate, you know, hey, what we've done, sometimes you have to tweak the way you set things up, and you have to kind of do a reset. And that's kind of where we are now on certain items, because we want to use we want to utilize HeavyJob, you know, to its fullest. And to do that, sometimes we have to take a step back because we didn't set it up the right way the first time. But I think we're getting there. And it's stuff like this is very helpful. I think that's a great point. And I'll probably touch on this a little bit, too, in payroll conversation here in just a second. But, a quick company is a little bit different in terms of the work they perform, the way they track it, the way they have to report on it and even just the way that they set their budgets up, right? How detailed the cost codes are. So there's always going to be a, potential conversation on how do we track this to make it make sense. And for manholes, it could be we track as a percentage complete almost to where there's one manhole and it's point three three, point three three, point three three over three days. There's reasons not to do that, reasons to do that, but it could just be that you end up putting cost, you know, hours towards that manhole on the first two days without any production quantity being realized because you don't track that until it's complete. And you know, if you kind of look at a graph of cost over time and revenue over time, it's gonna look like your cost is going up and revenue static. And then on that third day, the revenue is gonna jump up to, you know, to kind of match a little bit more with the cost. That's how it works sometimes, right? And so those are conversations that we've seen just about every way that companies have to deal with that. We've seen the pros and cons of it. One of the things about HeavyJob is not just the product itself, but the people behind it. When you buy HeavyJob, we have a pretty thorough implementation process where we're gonna go through what we call design session and talk you through all those potential, you know, kind of decision points. And of course, the the setup of integration with accounting and the way that you wanna set up your budgets and where your estimates are coming from and make sure that kind of those standard operating procedures are understood and addressed so that the system is going to work the way that you need it to. And then beyond that, we will of course coach your team, train your team on how to use the software so that it is rolled out smoothly and cleanly. So a lot of conversation that we go through with that. There are certainly different ways to use the product. We wanna make sure that it's being used the way that you need it to be used from the start. Companies change, companies evolve or right? Evan, you've said that you guys have done a couple things that you know, maybe you should have set it up differently the first time. You guys have learned lessons, you've grown, you've changed the way that you approach things. Maybe when we set it up with you the first time we set it up the right way for what you knew and what you were doing then. Right. But you've grown and evolved and you can either, you know, take the initiative to to kind of adapt the way you use have a job on your own or you can bring us back in to kind of consult with you on that and retrain or rebuild a little bit as Yeah. A lot of times when you start off, you don't know what you don't know. So you're trying to make your best initial guess of here's what I think we need to track. And so you, as you do that, part of it is, is if you're not, I'm not going say constantly working with it, but if you're not kind of doing a refresher and a check back in how you're using the product, ultimately it could turn into just a glorified time card. And that's not what you want, because this can do so much to help you realize how your jobs are coming along. And if you're not careful and you're not paying attention, you can kind of let that fall by the wayside. But, you know, we look at this, we look at HeavyJob and all our other HCSS products as almost like an investment, almost like a piece of equipment. You know, if we buy a tractor, we're going to grease it, we're going to maintain it, we're going to keep up with it. We're just not going to let it sit on the yard and gather rust. Similarly, we're making an investment in these products. And so we want to look into each one of these and say, hey, are we using them the best way? Do we need to start analyzing our system so that we can maximize what we're paying for? Because we want to, you know, ultimately be a better company because of this and not just kind of go through the motions. And so sometimes it does take a second to do some self reflection and go, man, we got that wrong. Let's call and get some help from the tech team or the sales team to say, Hey, how do we fix this now that we've gone through a couple years of data when it's not what we need? And there's always a lot of help on the other end from HCSS's side that's been willing to jump in with us to say, yep, here's how we can mold this into a better product for you. Absolutely. Keeping an eye on the clock here, I'm going go ahead and move it to the payroll side of things so we don't irritate any accounting or payroll people in here that probably came to see that portion of it. So, I'm gonna flip back to my slides here for just a moment. We didn't get to really talk about the T and M side. Anybody that is very interested in doing T and M through HeavyJob, I would say we can probably set up a conversation after this. Evan, you gave a great testimonial and endorsement of it. So hopefully that's enough to, help people understand that we can handle that and it does it well. But I do want to talk a little bit about the billing and payroll side now. So within HeavyJob, there's gonna be probably a dozen different accounting systems, if not more that are being utilized by the people in this webinar. So this portion of the conversation, I don't have twelve different accounting systems installed on my computer. I don't know how to use twelve different accounting systems. So this is gonna be a little bit more philosophical than actually executing something here. But the idea is similar to everything that we've talked about so far. We work with any and every accounting system out there as long as they allow outside integrations. All popular ones that we see, you know, the QuickBooks, the Viewpoints, the Foundation, Sage, ComputeEase, CMIC, there's a bajillion of them. If you're using it, we've worked with it almost certainly. And we probably have stock exports that are already built for the integration from HeavyJob to your accounting system. So where a majority of that work happens is in the time card review process. I'm gonna spend a very brief second on this and just say that the time cards coming in from the field all accumulate here. I can see all the time cards that come in on a daily basis. I can filter these down by a specific project manager or by a specific foreman or by a specific job to see where these time cards are. And my review and approval process looks very similar to the entry screen and the entry process in the field. I can click on Andy's time card and see, okay, here's his crew, here's the hours he put in, here's the production quantities and the cost codes he worked on and make sure that everything looks right. Often kind of during this review process, people will be reallocating straight time to overtime because most of our customers don't ask their foreman to keep track of overtime. They just say put the hours in, we handle overtime on the office side. So that's one thing you'll notice my slash lines here that have already been, handled. Maybe this was ten hours before I moved those extra two to overtime as part of my review process. But the time cards are gonna be reviewed and approved here. And you'll kind of see all these have already been sent to payroll. So, you know, maybe I go to, well, we're already on this pay week and for whatever reason we decided to go ahead and fire this all over to payroll. This one's been rejected. You know, I can see the different levels of approval that you can set up multi tiered approval, a PM and an accounting person has to review before we're ready to send to accounting. But once all this has been reviewed, approved, ready to go to accounting, we can just go over to our export requests. And we, as part of the implementation process, we'll make sure that the template is set up the right way, set this up to export to whatever your accounting or payroll system is. Many of our customers have an ERP or accounting system they use for their costing and other records. And then a separate payroll solution, ADP, Paychex, you know, Kronos, whatever you name it. We can do multiple exports here. You'll see I have four different exports set up in my system to four different accounting systems. We could do a viewpoint export and an ADP export or a, you know, QuickBooks export and a Kronos export so that payroll hours and information go to one place and job cost production quantities, things like that go to another place. But really this is gonna be a template that's set up with your input. Make sure that it matches the way that your accounting system expects to receive this information. And then on a weekly basis, you just go and say, hey, I'm gonna request my file for this pay week. I'll go to this Viewpoint file, download it, and it spits out the whatever we have built with you. In this case, it's a text file. It's gonna look like gibberish here, but this is what Viewpoint wants. It's gonna have employee IDs, the date, the job code, the employee code, the hours worked, the, you know, pay adjustments, the pay class, anything else that's involved in the payroll data. And all you have to do is go over to your accounting system and import this and it's a very smooth process. Export file, import file, no double entry, no extra compiling of data. It's all a very smooth integration. And Evan, you guys are using foundations, is that right? Foundations, yes. Okay. You know, vote Yeah, simple. I mean, it's a push of a button. Once you get it set up and the beauty is you guys have worked with our payroll folks to set this up. And if there's a glitch or something that isn't working, your guys on the back end can look at the text and the programming and go, oh, okay, let's put this in this column in here, and then it just becomes seamless. We don't have to become computer programmers to get it to talk. That's what's the great thing is, you know, we've gotten great help from you guys on making sure this is almost just a single button push every week because it's set up in the beginning to match what we need. And it's great. I mean, it's really simple. We're not shuffling piles of time cards around, and we're not chasing a bunch of information. There on the dashboard. You know who you need to call. You know, the one foreman that forgot to turn something in, you know, or ladies in accounting can just reach out and go, hey, send your time card in. Oh yeah. And then submit it. It's great. Yeah. That's and during the implementation process, like I said, we work with you to make sure this is good. We do some user acceptance testing, a dry run or two before we go live with this to make sure that your team, is getting what they need out of it and that it's importing seamlessly. So, it's not a cross your fingers and hope it works, you know, when we go live with this. But then we do typically have somebody that is assigned to be available to you during the first time you do a payroll run and a payroll export from HeavyJob after you go live. Again, just to make sure someone's looking over your shoulder. The last thing we want is for, you know, you to forget how to run this or to push the wrong button even though at this point, it's a pretty seamless export import process. But if anything was left out or forgotten during our initial conversation, we wanna make sure that that first day of running payroll on a HeavyJob is is not a, you know, a full stop to your operations and that your people get paid. So that is kind of from the payroll side, and the accounting export side with cost and quantities. As much detail as I can get into in this webinar today, with as many different, you know, systems and people and and roles probably involved in the conversation at this point. But that does leave us with one minute left. I'm actually gonna pull this back up and put us on the Q and A slide. You guys have been very quiet from the chat so far. Hope everybody was able to find the Q and A in the chat if you had it. Maybe we're just doing that great of a job of talking, but, I highly doubt that that's the case. So if you do have any questions, please send them in. While we're waiting on maybe a few to come in, I'm gonna plug one or two final things. One being that, Evan, you talked about kind of this being similar to a piece of equipment where you guys want to maintain it. It's constantly evolving, constantly growing. We've probably got some existing HeavyJob users in here. A lot of the things we've talked about today, if you're seeing some tools that maybe you're not using as well or some things that caught your attention or even if you didn't see anything today, there's plenty of buttons I didn't push. I cannot push enough our users group meeting on anybody and everybody that's an HCSS customer. We do it every year at the beginning of the year. It's in January this year. It's usually in February, but pulled it up because of CONEXPO year. Three days here in Houston, ton of classes that go into a lot more detail on how these features work, how to get the most out of the system. Two thousand plus HCSS customers will be there with you for you to learn from and bounce ideas off of people just like Evan, but times two thousand, you know, for you to talk to and and learn from. If you haven't been, I highly recommend it. Evan, I know you've got some strong opinions on it. You actually told me something the other day about missing out last year, you don't mind just kind of saying that again real quick. Yeah. I I had gone about five years in a row, then I had a scheduling conflict last year and didn't get to go. And I I felt almost behind because every year there are new updates and new products and new formatting that makes HeavyJob, HCSS, whatever we're using better. And I felt like I missed out on some of the new things that were coming out, almost like I was behind. And I thought, man, I got to go back and get back to users group because the collaboration between the other people that are using the products where you can sit with someone and go, hey, what do you do at your place? You can glean such great ideas from folks that are actually using it. And then if you have an issue, a specific issue, there's opportunities to go sit down with HCSS product people and say, Hey, I can't get this to work. What am I missing? And they say, Oh, open it up. Bring your laptop. And they'll walk through it with you and have an opportunity to figure out your problem, not just on a global scale where you've a bunch of people in a classroom. And the value to that is just incredible because I want to be able to use the products that I have the best that I can. And if I feel like I'm stuck, no better chance than to go sit down with the people that are building it and say, Hey, I can't figure this out. And it's great. And I've really got a lot of help over the years for being able to sit down, talk to folks, and talk to the people at HCSS to kind of figure things out. So yeah, I'll put a plug in for it. I'm going back this year, looking forward to it. It also gives you the opportunity to explore new products to see if it's something you want your company to grow with. You may have HeavyJob, you may have HeavyBid, but it's like, hey, what about dispatcher? What about some of the other things that can help it all come together? And that's a great opportunity to kind of dive into those things as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I love FaceTime with the customers. I love having everybody grow there. It's my favorite event of the year and literally I cannot recommend it more. It's timely because we actually have our super early bird pricing going on through tomorrow. So tomorrow's the last day for two hundred dollars off registration. So if you've got anybody that is thinking about going, two hundred bucks off if you register by tomorrow. If you miss that, still a hundred bucks off if you register in November, but might as well get the extra hundred if you want to. We did have one question come in asking about reporting across multiple jobs. And the short answer to that is yes, absolutely. You know, most of the things that we looked at today were single jobs but I can take a look at, one of my favorite things to do is look at a specific cost code. If I had a problem with the cost code on this job, let me go run a report, my cost code detail report and see every job this year or the last ten jobs or whatever else I wanna do it on, my project manager. Is that a trend that we've constantly missed out on, you know, profit on production on whatever it might be on that cost code across every job or across most jobs? Or was it a problem with this one project and we just need to kinda learn from it, figure out how to do that? Because if it is a trend, that's that information you can feed back into your estimating team and say, hey, look, guys, we we keep missing this. I don't think we can hit the production rate or the targets that you guys are bidding. Might wanna dial it back a little bit to make sure we're not putting ourselves behind the eight ball from the jump on these projects. So, great question. Answer is absolutely yes. I know we're a couple minutes over. The last thing I wanna leave you guys with, if you enjoyed this webinar or maybe even if you didn't, we do have another webinar coming up in a couple weeks that is gonna be on HCSS Insights. So if you go to the HCSS events page on our website, you can go find upcoming webinars. On November thirteenth, we're hosting a webinar, talking about HCSS Insights, which is kind of a Power BI powered, platform where all of your HCSS data can come in. We've got some pre built reports, a lot of visibility on there. It's actually free to use. So you don't have to have a user subscription. Great for executives, managers, directors, whoever. I mean, even people kind of on the day to day operations side, project managers, estimators, if they wanna get in there, there's a lot more insight into, no pun intended, their HCSS project data and it's also cross products. So if you're using multiple HCSS products, you can see trends across HeavyJob and safety or HeavyBid and HeavyJob or the way that some of those projects and data sets interact. So, encourage you to join us if you have time on November thirteenth. Please join us for a users group meeting. If you can make it out here to Houston in late January. If you got any questions, had my info up here a second ago. Again, I'm Taylor Pruitt. Feel free to email me, call us, get in touch with your customer success rep, sales rep. Happy to schedule follow-up conversations on anything that didn't get answered today or that you're just curious about. So I'm gonna leave it at that since we're already over time. I appreciate everybody joining. Evan, thank you so much for your contributions, man. It has been, great to have you here. Always love talking to you, and, hopefully, we can do it again sometime. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thank you.