CHAPTER 4
Management Tools
Welcome to ServiceTitan’s Commercial Playbook—an aggregation of best practices from across the industry, written purposely for your Commercial business. In this playbook, you’ll learn all the key tips and tricks (what we call “best practices”) needed to take your business to the next level.
SECTION 2 OF 5
Project Tracking
Contractors know they need to watch and track project costing. Tracking this is how we figure out what our margins are, which projects have the largest margins, where efficiency can improve, and which project should NEVER be done again.
“Think of it this way,” Gonzales said. “It's allowing the managers who don't have access to the accounting software to see exactly where the project is at. They get a real, live, up-to-date accounting of the project.
“As long as the team is completing the appointments and handling everything that they're supposed to do with P.O.’s, they'll have up-to-date project costs and tracking, no matter what time of the day.”
The Project Tracking capabilities increase both efficiency and profitability.
“If you want to increase profit margins, well you have to track your margins first, right? Well, ServiceTitan allows you to do that within ServiceTitan without having to create spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Before, somebody would update one spreadsheet, but then wouldn't save it. It was always a soup sandwich.
“What ServiceTitan has done is it's allowed us to get all of it together and sort it and organize it in one place.”
Better tracking will show holes in effectiveness, poor efficiency, higher than average material costs or overages in labor. Tracking will also show you if the job was bid correctly, or if pricing needs to be adjusted. Your budget for the project would be set up in the bidding process, and the actual numbers will populate once the job starts.
Reporting shows how much of the budget is left and the dollar amount of the variance.
While Service Titan is not the only solution, it allows many fields that can be customized to make the reporting as detailed as needed. It also breaks the numbers down by department, phase of the project, and which phase has been billed.
Tracking the budget outside of your software leaves more room for human error, and assures the latest version of the spreadsheet is being used by everyone.
Additional Tips
Review your number daily until the project is complete. This will allow you to make real-time adjustments and keep your project on budget.
ServiceTitan Best Practice:
Make sure your CSM has turned this feature on to be able to use it.
You do not need to have progress billing turned on to use project job costing, but the features will work together if desired.
Resources
Knowledge base article:
Knowledge base article Project Job costing overview: