Inspiration to Create AboutTime

This letter from Ryan Remkes, CEO and Founder of AboutTime Technologies says it all!  

AboutTime Team,

My wife was home cleaning out files from my construction business, Better Builders.  She found this sampling of "Time Sheets" and "Daily Logs" from 14 years ago in 2000.   She snapped a picture and sent it to me titled "Inspiration to create AboutTime." At the time, I had about 40 employees and this was the typical and common way to capture what was going on in the field. Check out the level of "detail and accuracy." This picture represents the core problem we help our customers solve every day.

It is amazing to me now, looking back, that I could actually turn a small profit and grow a business with such inefficient methods of measuring and managing field labor and project production!

Thousands upon thousands of companies are still managing their most valuable resources, their work force, assets and their businesses this same way today.  Some companies have graduated from paper and are now using a spreadsheet or possibly a cleaner form.  Still they require their workforce to manually input (and estimate) field information at the end of the day or even worse, at the end of the week. Foremen are guessing on assets used and cost codes.  The information is outdated and inaccurate before it even hits accounting. These companies need our solution. They are our future customers.  They are why we started AboutTime.

This small sampling of old time sheets and daily logs brought back many memories. Today the AboutTime solutions provide drastically improved accuracy, accountability and visibility... so much more than I ever had as a contractor. Our customers gain competitive advantages that help their teams work efficiently, it reaffirms to me that we are doing the right thing to help our customers enjoy a much better way to manage mobile resources. It's AboutTime!

Ryan Remkes

CEO AboutTime Technologies

Time is Gold

An Albanian proverb says, “Time is Gold” which roughly translated means “Time is Money.”   This has never been truer than it is in todays hurried world.  Your customers set schedules, and you are expected to meet them.  When you don’t, your customers are unhappy, and fines may even be imposed.   Monitoring projects to make sure you can meet the time schedule you committed to can be a huge undertaking, especially if you have multiple projects running at the same time.  Using a mobile resource management solution can help to make sure projects are completed on time ensuring that the “Gold” stays in your business. 

A mobile resource management solution begins by managing your largest asset, your employees.   Time and attendance systems let you know when an employee clocks in or out but a mobile resource management solution should do more.  Not only knowing when employees clock in/out but also knowing where, what task they worked on, and how much of the task was completed can give you the information you need to make sure your project is running on time.

A mobile resource management system should integrate with your accounting or job costing system.  Sending and receiving data in real time and comparing actual time spent against budgeted time gives you and your employees a clear picture of where a project stands.  This information can show your foreman how much of a project is completed and how much still needs to be done, allowing them to make critical decisions.  For example, if a job is only 40% done but you have used up 80% of your budgeted time, a foreman can add an employee to the job to make sure it is completed on schedule.  Inversely, if a job is 80% done and you have only used up  50% of your budgeted hours, the foreman can decide to reassign an employee to a different task, reducing your payroll associated to that project ensuring that more “gold” stays in your business. 

Document Everything

Technology today makes documenting EVERYTHING about a project simple.  Not documenting EVERYTHING is a mistake most businesses can’t afford to make.

In this post, I want to tell you a story about how documenting time spent on tasks can resolve billing questions and how it helped one of our AboutTime customers.

In Utah, snow happens.  A couple of years ago a huge storm dumped a few feet of snow bringing a lot of construction projects to a halt.  Being behind schedule, a customer needed to clear the snow and continue framing in order to meet the established deadlines.  When the foreman called and told the contractor that they couldn’t frame, the contractor said just shovel the snow.  The framer and contractor worked out a deal of $25.00 a man-hour to shovel snow.  The framers shoveled the snow and then framed the house.  Later, on the same job, when the trusses arrived they were the wrong size.  Still running behind on the project, the contractor asked the framer to modify the trusses instead of waiting for more to be made and shipped.  The framer and the contractor worked out a deal of $25.00 a man hour to modify the trusses.  They modified the trusses and completed the framing project.  When the contractor was presented with the bill, he yelled “No Way!”  This is a lot of money!  How do we know you really spent this much time on shoveling snow and modifying the trusses?”  That is when accurate documentation saved the framers.

The framer was using the AboutTime solution.  Each time his employees clocked IN they clocked IN to a specific task, like shoveling snow.  When they were done shoveling snow, they clocked IN to framing and continued working.   The same process was followed with the truss modifications.  When the contractor said “Prove it”  the framer did!  He pulled a report that showed the exact time his workers started shoveling and the exact time they finished.  The detail was so precise there was no room for argument, and the contractor simply paid the bill.

Documenting everything from employee activities to weather conditions can reduce billing time, eliminate frivolous lawsuits, and even help with future project planning.