Project planning

What’s your Buildertrend silver bullet?

what's your silver bullet?

When first jumping into Buildertrend, it can seem a bit overwhelming. There’s a lot of new information and it can be tough to know where to start. In addition to a couple training sessions, we suggest getting to know our core four features: Schedule, Daily Logs, To-Do’s and File Management.

By dedicating some time to these four features, you’ll see why they should be your Buildertrend silver bullet for ensuring the continued success of your construction business.

Scheduling for success

Schedule: Keep projects moving

We call the Schedule feature the backbone of our construction software. Starting each of your jobs with building a schedule is the easiest way to understand the full extent of each project.

The Schedule will act as a source of truth for the duration of each job and maintaining it will keep projects moving. You can also share schedule items with key stakeholders including your team, subcontractors and clients to ensure everyone’s always on the same page.

If you’re like us, it helps to see a project from all angles. Lucky for you, the Schedule feature can be seen through multiple views – nine to be exact. Each unique view has a purpose to match the task at hand.

For example, say you’re on the month view, but you need to rearrange a couple schedule items, we would suggest switching over to the Gantt view. The Gantt view allows you to link and rearrange schedule items with ease. When you move one item, the others follow suit and adjust accordingly, keeping everything in order.

Using the Schedule keeps your projects rolling, informs everyone of updates and makes it easy to adjust timelines quickly.

Daily Logs: Document progress

Daily Logs are essentially progress reports within our construction software that allow your team, trade partners and clients to see what’s been done on a day-to-day basis. With access to Daily Logs, subs and clients can keep track of project progress without having call you for updates.

It’s also important to note, when entering a daily log, you and your team have the ability to add documents, photos and videos. This will allow for important project details or completed work from that day to be verified. Your team can also make notes when parts don’t arrive or there’s a problem with design that requires input from the homeowner.

With Daily Logs, you’ll never have to worry about whether or not work is getting done. You can quickly check on the progress of each job from your computer or the mobile app to make sure things are running smoothly.

To-Do’s: Ensure project organization

Are you staying organized by adding To-Do’s to your schedule items? If not, you should be and here’s why. By adding To-Do’s, you can easily monitor what’s getting done and by who. You can assign to-do items to team members or subs, which makes it easy to track job progress and know who’s responsible for each task.

You can also assign To-Do’s to your clients. This is a great way to keep communication open for important decision making and allows them to be involved at every step.

Adding To-Do’s will help you to streamline your job processes and ensure accountability.

File Management: Never lose important information

Ready to limit the amount of time you spend on searching for documents, printing files and other repetitive tasks? Using Buildertrend’s file management features can help manage and store your seemingly endless amounts of paperwork and files to ensure easy day-to-day operations.

Our unlimited cloud-based storage allows you to keep all documents, files, photos and videos organized and readily available. No more searching through miscellaneous files on your computer or rifling through paperwork in a filing cabinet. All important information is stored in one place and can be found quickly within organized folders for each job. And in the event of a dispute, you can access to your files at a moment’s notice.

It’s unrealistic to think that job site mistakes never happen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t avoid them, right?

Storing important documents for each of your jobs in one central location reduces the chance of things getting lost. More importantly, you will avoid additional work by allowing your job site team, office team and subcontractors to view and work from the same documents. Any markups or annotations made will be updated in real time, eliminating the need for guess work and reducing the chance of delays.

Keeping files organized within our construction software will make it much harder for mistakes to happen in the field and guarantees you always have what you need, when you need it.

Let us show you how to make Buildertrend your silver bullet

If you’d like to learn more about our core four features, reach out to your account executive and get scheduled for a training! Have questions? Feel dree to reach out and our team will be standing by to help with anything you need.

If you think these features could help you manage your construction business, and you’re ready to take the next step, schedule a demo today!

About The Author

Chelsea Cole headshot

Chelsea Cole Chelsea Cole is a senior content marketing specialist at Buildertrend

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