How to Work Smarter and Make Better Sense of the Numbers

• If you’re an accounting professional or finance leader in your construction organization, you know at the end of the day, it’s all a numbers game.
• Yet, when the numbers don’t add up—and they often don’t—how do you ensure both your teams working in the field and the teams making the key business decisions have the right information to work from?

Your Role as a Construction Accounting or Finance Leader

If you’re a finance professional like a CFO or comptroller, you might be charged with ensuring your company’s books stay out of the red, that cash flow is solvent. Even more, you might be the “person with the checkbook,” responsible for making smart purchases of capital assets, business solutions, vendors, partners and more. You likely rely on your team of accounting professionals to feed you with accurate, timely data, culled from literally dozens of sources—from projects to organizational departments to outside interests.

That’s why as an accounting professional, the pressure is often on you. And your job ain’t easy. Sometimes, the accounting “team” may be just one person. Sometimes dozens. Either way, you likely have data flying at you from all angles. You may be responsible for simply keeping tracks of the general ledger and cash flow. You might be responsible for making sense of your projects’ job costs or work in progress reports. You might be in charge of purchasing, accounts payable or receivable, or billing. You might even do it all—with a steady helping of payroll thrown in every week for good measure.

What Construction Finance and Accounting Professionals Want

Real-time, connected workflows can make all the difference when it comes to protecting your company's bottom line. What you number-crunchers have shared with us, time and time again, is that there are five key elements that really help your work: speed, accuracy, consistency, ease of use, and trust. This means operating in a truly connected construction environment where:

• You and your teams are working with real-time (or near real-time) data
• The right people can access the data they need any time, anywhere
• Everyone is working from the same set of standardized data
• That data is up-to-date, accurate and trustworthy
• Working in software is easy, and process automation makes collaboration with other people in the organization or project stakeholders even easier
• There is peace of mind knowing the important data is protected, and managed by a trusted vendor

Unfortunately, many contractors today don’t have the right tools in place to realize a connected construction experience. Siloed teams, disconnected software programs with wildly different data sets, cumbersome in-house IT management for things like server maintenance, software updates, and backups; and even manual processes like pen and paper all bog the construction process down. And, it’s largely you number crunchers that end up paying the biggest price: wasting hours trying to reconcile data, build reports with incomplete data, tracking down and correcting mistakes … and often working late.

Why a Connected Construction Suite is Your Answer

You have already heard of the cloud by this point, and might recognize the benefits of the real-time data and workflows. But, as an accounting or finance professional, you know better than anyone else that just making a move for the sake of making a move isn’t the most cost-effective approach.

Instead, moving to the cloud should be a transformation. With a suite of connected solutions like Trimble Construction One, real-time data and collaboration, coupled with workflow automation and powerful new tools like analytics and dashboards, you can still be your organization’s workhorse, with maybe one-fifth of the effort you’re probably putting in right now.

Trimble Construction One is a connected, cloud-based construction management platform that drives productivity, efficiency and accuracy at each phase of the construction project lifecycle. Leveraging cloud data and workflows, it ties together all facets of construction—from estimating and bidding, to project setup and project management, to accounting and workforce management, to field and service management, to project closeout and delivery—in collaborative working environments with a single set of shared data.

Using data from all phases of construction, Trimble Construction One connects teams with real-time information that shows true project costs and resource allocation so they get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

For construction finance and accounting professionals, this means:

• An accurate, centralized job costing system of record, driven by real-time data on payroll, materials, equipment, subcontractors, and productivity
• Connected workflows with estimating, planning, and project management to help projects move faster
• Streamlined approval processes and automation for critical business functions like accounts payable and receivable, purchase orders, job billing, and more
• On-demand reporting and dashboards with ability to drill into cost details across all project phases to ensure they are on budget and the company’s business is profitable
• Enhanced cybersecurity and other data protections, with user level permissions, multi-factor authentication, and more to keep the company’s business assets safe

And that’s just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Watch what a true connected construction environment could deliver for your organization:

Want to learn more? Connect with Trimble today for your own personal tour of how Trimble Construction One could reshape your construction organization.