For property maintenance
Software for property maintenance companies
A joiner lifts a fire door off and the frame comes away with it. Somebody at the customer says crack on. Nobody writes it down, and at invoice time the extra work is either argued over or quietly dropped.
What it looks like running
Brackenhall is a demonstration we built for an invented joinery and property maintenance firm. The office screen shows what is waiting on a price, what is sitting with customers and which job cannot be invoiced yet. The phone screen is the joiner's day, and it flags the job that is still missing its after photos.
How these businesses run
Most of the work comes from a handful of customers: letting agents, housing providers, commercial landlords. Each sends a steady stream of repairs, and each has its own way of approving them.
A job is booked by the office, done by somebody in a van and approved by somebody at the customer who was not there. Every one of those handovers is a chance for a detail to go missing.
Finding extra work on site is normal. Getting it priced and agreed before anyone starts is not, and the gap between the two is where the money leaks out.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Jobs arrive by email, phone and text, and the office types each one in again
- Extra work is agreed by a text on site and nobody can find it at invoice time
- A job cannot be invoiced because the after photos are still on someone's phone
- The office rings the van to find out where a job is up to
- Every customer approves work differently and the rules live in one person's head
- Nobody can say how much priced extra work is sitting with customers unanswered
Sound like your business?
Tell us which of these costs you the most time and we will tell you what we would build, roughly what it would cost and how long it would take.
What we can build for this
What we can build for this kind of business, built around the way the work actually runs.
- One record per job holding the booking, the photos, the notes and every approval in order
- Extra work priced on site and sent to the customer to approve from a link
- A rule that holds a job back from invoicing while anything on it is unapproved or missing
- A phone screen for each operative with today's jobs, working with no signal
- Before and after photos taken against the job, not left in a camera roll
- A board showing who is out, what needs a price and what is sitting with customers
- Approval rules and paperwork per customer, so they live in the system
- A view for each customer of their own jobs, so the status call stops
- Invoices built from the job record, so the total matches what was agreed
How a project would work
We would start with one job that went wrong: extra work that was never billed, or an invoice that came back disputed. Followed from the first call to the last payment, it usually shows exactly where the record breaks.
Operatives get the phone screen first, and it has to ask them for less than they do now. If it is slower than texting the office, it will not get used.
Ready to see what it would take?
Watch the short briefing first, or book a review and talk it through with us.
See it working
A short film of one of our own demonstrations, recorded from the running software. Every company in it is invented, and the link opens the real thing.
Brackenhall Property Services · Construction and property maintenance
Every variation priced, sent, answered and captured, and a job that cannot be released for invoicing while there is a hole in the record.
What that usually means building
Questions we get asked
- Can customers approve extra work without downloading an app?
- Yes. The price goes to them as a link. They open it on their phone, see the work and the photograph, and approve or decline. The answer is saved against the job with their name and the time, so it is there when the invoice goes out.
- What happens when an operative has no signal on site?
- The phone keeps the day's jobs and lets them carry on. Notes and photographs are held on the phone and sent to the office as soon as the signal comes back.
- Can it pass finished jobs to our accounts package?
- It can be built to, so nothing is typed twice. Which package you use is one of the first things we ask, because it decides how invoices leave the system.
Tell us how your business actually runs
We build around the way the work already happens rather than fitting a business to software that was written for somebody else. Describe the part that costs you the most time and we will tell you what we would build and roughly what it would cost.