why move with the times if its gonna slow me up??
fiddling about with a mobile at work is wasting time IMO.its for window cleaners who ve got a memory with a span of 10 seconds!
i dont even have worksheets!i look in george the night before work.make a mental note of custies that owe me 2 wks.print out any invoices etc.go and clean what i can the next day!update when i get home in the evening.
for a sole trader its not the way forward for guys who employ it might have some benefits.
I agree with dazmond.
When you are out an about cleaning the aim is to clean as many jobs in the time you have. To be fiddling about with a mobile device to update stuff is a waste of time in my opnion also.
Even if its just ticking boxes, you still have to wait for the program to open, internet connection, etc. etc.
The idea of Round Management in my opnion is more the PLANNING of what jobs you are going to do, planning the day to maximise its potential, prioritising work. You mould the worklist to suit the day (or week) - to make the day as lucrative as possible. That's why we have the A - E grading. When we have more work than we can do in that day, in that area we just filter out the poor jobs and do the cream jobs. As Slumpbuster said, its all about filling up your day. If you have a high volumne of work then you are in a position to choose the best jobs and use poor jobs as 'gap fillers'.
That's all done BEFORE YOU GO to work. When you get back you quickly update what you did and then plan the next days work list. As Daz says most sole traders will know and remember what they did during the day and who paid. Job lists and worksheets are more for reference than anything else.
More often than not though there are other things to note such as skip next two times because of building work, new customers to enter, next time wants inside done or whatever... It's easy to do that on a printed worksheet which you refer to when updating at base, would surely be faffy on a hand held device.
If you have employees then lists can be emailed or whatever, updated and sent back.
We just print them off and hand the list back marked off. For instance there are three of use that work together doing shop work. I plan the work lists the evening before. I pretty much know what we are capable of cleaning in a morning and so create a list that amounts to our target figure. We split up when we work so I divide the work load into areas roughly the same amount and use the Mark/Order column of the Job List to label the jobs 1,2 or 3.
I then print off Job List 1, Job List 2 and Job List 3.
We meet at 7 for a quick coffee in the morning and each one takes his list, goes and does the work. At the end of the morning I get the lists back that they have done ticked off with a pen and marked if they owe or anything, notes of new customers to add, appointments made etc. Usually they do the marking off at the end of morning all in one go and it takes less than a minute to do. I rarely mark my list because I know myself what I've done.
The updating the round on the computer just takes just a couple of minutes in the evening but the point is:
The main benefit of having a Round Management program is having the flexibility to mould together a worklist based on when it's due, what areas you are in and the priority level of the work.
- So you have to sit down the night before and spend 5 mins doing that anyway - might as well do all the updating while you are at it.