Scheduling & Quoting Program For Flooring Contractor?

brianosaur

I’d like to upgrade our filing & records situation to one that actually uses a keyboard.

I took over my fathers hardwood flooring business about 3 years ago upon his retirement. He only used paper and it was a big deal when he bought a fax 10 years ago. All the customer files, scheduling and estimates were/are done on paper. The “can’t teach and old dog a new trick” adage was well into play while pops was still running things.

Our company does many jobs at smaller cost base. As opposed to other home improvement tradesman who may be in one home for several weeks or months doing a large job, we are usually in 10-20 houses a week doing smaller jobs.

With smaller flooring jobs, we can give many est's over the phone based on square footage. These phone calls are recorded in a notebook. If we do look at a job, it is put on paper and filed as a physically ‘viewed quote’.

When the job is booked it goes on a 3x5 index card containing the customer info and what getting performed. The card is then filed by date and, when the time comes, taken out and placed on a weekly scheduling board for easy viewing and (re)arranging by crew.

Now that the old boy is sunning him self and tinkering ‘round his house, I’d like to take the company into the new millennium. Actually, we are already using quickbooks for payroll, accounts payable & receivable, but as stated already, I’d like to use a PC to do everything that I've listed.

What programs are out there to handle my needs?

Thanks

woodmagman

Your most basic way to is make a template on Micosoft Word or Excel, where you enter in all the generic information name, address, time of call, estimate and so on. Then SAVE the document to a month or yearly file with the the customer name on the file. Real simple, if you have and understand these programs, if not good luck.

brianosaur

Well I know the basics of Excel. How would Word be used? -make a file for each customer? Doesn't seem very productive.

Danahy

quickbooks seems to be a logical migration to me. You're already using it, and can be great for everything else. For the scheduling aspect use the quickbooks, customer manager. Information easily moves between the two, which cuts out a ton of redundancy.

Before you spend a dime, I just really think you should look into what's available with what you already have. Creating new files for everything, little spreadsheets, and calendar programs such as outlook... can be a full time job. Espescially when you let time go by, then you need to remember where was this, what file was that... blah, no tks.