A common area where outsourced solutions are required is virtual support in the building industry.
A Builder usually sets up a business because they are good at the trade – not necessarily good at admin!
But running a business in the building industry has many requirements from booking in appointments, quoting, invoicing and making payments, to record keeping and social media posts.
Having a team to do all these is not warranted for the average size building firm in the UK having 1-9 employees and being classed as a micro business, so virtual support in the building industry is ideal.
So if you are in the building industry what can be done virtually?
Financial Admin – it is likely that you will have an accountant, but did you know that you could use a virtual solution for your bookkeeping and to make your accountants life easier – we all want a happy accountant! Using Virtual Support to log invoices, receipts and keep track of payments whilst you are on the tools can save valuable time of an evening at the dining table! Health and Safety – a necessity but can take up your time. To get your risk assessments right and construction phase plans if you need them, we recommend outsourcing this to a H&S consultant (we recommend Prohas). But keeping track of your training refresher dates, employees skills etc can be a task that gets pushed down the to do list – virtual support can keep this up to date for you.
Other basic records such as employees’ holidays, shifts worked and mileage are other processes you can pass to someone else to do. One client we work with has their employees log their time on Clockify, which is set up with the company’s projects. Staff can log their time against each project, then SliceVA downloads the data and using set charge out rates can upload this information to the corresponding project on the company’s accounting software.
We’re pretty sure not many builders fancy themselves a social media expert but they have got lots of great content ideas to show off. Before and after shots are great marketing. If you can get the content to SliceVA we can write the captions and schedule the posts. You can have a Facebook post go out about your business whilst you are up a ladder!
So, what are the benefits to using virtual support in the building industry?
Keep your working hours down – average site hours are 8am-6pm, which means all the above needs to be done after hours, using a virtual solution means the admin can be done whilst you are on the tools. Giving you your evenings and weekends back.
Let someone else be the expert – you are the specialist at extensions and brickwork, it’s ok that numbers and social media aren’t your thing. Leave that to the expert and be confident that this area of your business is being taken care of by someone who knows what they are doing.
Save money – in theory and in practice. If you do the work, in theory you need to absorb the cost into your overheads, eating into your profits, we are confident that your charge out rate and our charge out rate are competitive and virtual support is going to be the more cost-effective option. If you are in the building trade and want to lose the paperwork and get some time back then please get in touch and let us take a Slice!