Join Tammy Alexander from QuickBooks to learn which small changes she’s seen make a big impact in construction businesses.
If you’d like to find a QuickBooks Solution Provider to help you with your business, check out our directory.
Join Tammy Alexander from QuickBooks to learn which small changes she’s seen make a big impact in construction businesses.
If you’d like to find a QuickBooks Solution Provider to help you with your business, check out our directory.
Are you in the construction or contracting business and looking for ways to save time and money? Welcome to the Constructing Growth podcast. My name is Nate Flake and I'm here to help you discover ways to streamline your back office,
automate your workflows, and find the right tools to help you set up your business for growth. Welcome back to the Constructing Growth podcast with QuickBooks solution providers,
the podcast that's all about helping construction companies to help you find the right tools to help you set up your business. Today, we have an awesome guest. Her name is Tammy Alexander. She's a Senior Partner Development Manager here at Intuit. Welcome, Tammy.
You want to introduce yourself a little bit? Yeah, Nate. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. This is great. So much fun. My name is Tammy Alexander. As Nate said, I am a Senior Partner Development Manager at Intuit currently.
I have a very diverse background, both in accounting and construction technology. I started my career as an accountant with a very large construction management firm and spent eight years moving all over the world and enjoyed every single minute of it.
My husband was a project manager and it was awesome. We got to move around together and then we had kids. It was like, okay, wait, what do we do? I then took a little hiatus from construction, went to education,
decided that wasn't for me, came back to construction. Went to work for an integration platform. as a service. Rivet was a great place to be, a wonderful startup, spent almost five years with them,
essentially building really giant integrations between large ERP solutions and modern day construction technology. There's a lot of it out there, a lot of really nice integrations to be built from there,
and moved on to Intuit, where I help our software vendor partners do a bunch of stuff, whether it be, be find their place that into it, find where they're best suited to be, build their integrations,
start building their integrations, advance their integrations, and then help our mutual customers. Awesome. Well, thanks for that, Tammy. I know that we've worked together now for a couple years and your background so unique because you have both the accounting perspective and kind of the ISV perspective on the tech side.
So anyways, our listeners are in for a treat with this one. So So today we're gonna be talking about technology tweaks for transformation and what that means in this space. So what do you think are some simple steps that construction companies can take to upgrade their tech stack?
Assuming they have something. Like let's assume they have some, start with something. - From somewhere, right? There's so many construction technology applications out there that can really advance one's business.
Their finances. finances, their project management solutions, their way they do expense reports, the way they time track. Construction is a giant industry. I think today the second largest industry in the world,
billions and billions of dollars of spend, but yet they have been the slowest to adopt technology. Over the course of many, many years, we've all been kind of fighting for the industry to make advancements,
to kind of push forward and take advantage of this technology. not only from a safety standpoint, from a usability standpoint, but from a basic business standpoint, right? A run your business and do it better.
So that question is really hard, Nate, right? Because the largest of large have kind of made this advancement. They're starting to take on this, the technology advances even in the field,
right? With the robots and the really cool things that technology has allowed. construction companies to do. I would say that construction companies today can really look at their overall business.
They all know where they're losing money, where they're making money. Where are they losing money and where are they losing the most money? A lot of times we see time tracking as the smallest tweak a company can make.
Where are those where are they signing in? When are they getting to the job? How can we track them? How can we make them safer? So I think taking a step back and looking at your holistic business and seeing,
okay, what's the first step I can take and what is going to make the biggest impact to my bottom line? Because we're all losing money, you know, eking out money somewhere when it comes to this industry. A follow -up question of that.
When you were an accountant for a construction company, what was like your biggest pain? pain point? What were you like begging them to change? Like, oh, I wish to hear, here's my pain point. Like magic wand. What would you have loved to change with some type of tech?
It's, it's a hilarious answer. My superintendents and because I worked on really large construction projects, my, my superintendents would bring me their expense reports in a shoebox and set them on my desk and sometimes not just a month,
sometimes two or three months. months at a time and literally their receipts would be in the shoe box and they'd set it on my desk and be like your turn. And I think looking back,
if I could have solved anything for my position and for theirs, honestly, keeping track of that, some of them were putting at that point on their personal cards and not being reimbursed,
you know, for two or three months at a time, I think I would have solved expense reports. Like that would have been my biggest solve, especially on these really big, big projects with big dollars being spent.
Another concern with that for me was getting that on the job costing report, right? Getting that expense that the superintendent had outlaid back onto that job costing report in order to understand where we were,
red, black. You know, you never knew from day to day. Well, that's up. like sometimes it came months later, right? So you're like, okay, well, thank this is closed. This project's been closed.
Now I have to go reopen it. This one's closed. And how do I correct this? How do I get the superintendent reimbursed? I've left the job site three months ago, right? We closed this project out with corporate or whatever that answer was.
And it was a huge issue. Yeah. Sounds wild. All right, let's change subjects and dive into PM software. Any PM softwares you've seen that you'd recommend specifically for construction?
- Yeah, absolutely. And I think construction is a giant industry. So I'll take a step back from that. There are a lot of software solutions that are suited for GCs. They're suited for construction management firms.
They're very well suited for the service industry. So I wanna be shorted to say in this podcast, look, when you're looking for a solution, solution that your field team members are going to utilize,
right, because we're solving now for the field team members, look for your specific industry and exactly what you're doing and make sure that you're picking a solution that kind of narrows into that,
narrow your focus. Don't go really broad. Don't solve for the construction management or the GC world if you are an HVAC company, because you're not going to be able to do that.
need to narrow your focus and be able to provide a solution to your field team members that serves for work orders and really, really specific nitty gritty details. I will say that I do have my favorites.
I have my favorites that I've worked with for years. Noify is a QSP partner at Intuit, and their solution continues to grow in the trades that it will serve.
They have a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer. They have a lot to offer. a GC portal They've got a trade portal So I would say no if I is one of my favorite solutions that continues to serve construction companies problems I'll also throw out the gold standard pro -core is one of my absolute favorite solutions for GCs and
construction management companies Also for those owners in the world right the developers the owners it solves a very hierarchy hierarchy solution. It's a big umbrella of a solution that really captures a lot of the nitty -gritty of the industry inside of it.
If you're looking for home building, right, you need to go take a look at Builder Trend. It's the best residential construction software out there. It really is. So just making everyone aware that there are really highly focused solutions for your particular industry.
And be sure that you're doing your research there. Get some help. Ask somebody for recommendations when it comes to that tech stack so that you can take a broad look and then narrow it down. That would be my advice.
- Yeah, it sounds like, you know, they each have their strengths as far as, as far as, you know, exact construction industry type. - Yeah, absolutely. - That's great advice. Let's move on to mobile communication tools.
Any that you've seen. heard of in this space that you'd recommend? Yeah, I really think it depends on what you're trying to do. In the industry, there's so many things that when I say communication,
who am I trying to communicate with? Am I trying to get information back to the architects? Am I trying to get information to my boss? Am I trying to get information to maybe the GC on site?
Who am I trying to communicate with? And I think the solutions I mentioned earlier all have internal chat systems. They all have shareability. You look at Procore and the ability to share RFIs and submittals and drawings and keep all of that kind of in one space.
If we think about it that way where all the data is literally in one space and we're looking at, you know, can I ask the right question? Can I send the right question to the architect? So I think it really depends on what the company in general is looking at.
to achieve when they say the word communication because that's super broad. And it really depends again on who they're trying to communicate with because that team is massive when it comes to,
you know, you're constructing a building and maybe you got the GC on site, but you've got the architect and the owner and, you know, all these layers. That's a great point. Moving on from tools, one of the things that seems to keep coming up in these episodes is,
and you mentioned it, right? Like, construction space seems to be one of the slowest industries to change as far as getting modernized with tech solutions and things like that. I think part of that is because they're very cost -conscious.
Absolutely. So, can you think of some things that companies, you know, construction companies can start doing without significant investment? Like, what are some baby steps? That's a great question. I think that there are so many things that come can do,
even from a very small standpoint, even making a small investment. But I think what you really have to look into, and I mentioned this in the beginning, is where are you leaking dollars?
And we all are. We know that our job costing reports are showing a certain dollar amount, but we all know that money was spent somewhere else that we could have saved or that we could have garnered back into the job.
So, I think that in order to start small, you have to know, like I said, that shoebox thing, if we could have solved that expense report issue, how much dollars were being spent on my time,
entering and data entering, just managing that data entry all day long, right, for three super intendants, times two or three months, right, at a time. So how many hours were spent on that labor and that intense labor effort.
So when it comes to labor, to labor, that's a big one today. The labor is hard to find and it's hard to keep. So when you train somebody, you wanna keep them. The smallest step that a construction company can take is to find a solution that is fully integrated,
whether it be for expense management, whether it be for project management, whether it be for time tracking, the smallest step that you can take is to find a solution that is fully integrated.
doesn't break the bank, of course, but that allows your field team and accounting team members to have one place to find integrated data. Data is power. Data is the king of all things when it comes to construction.
I think that's something that we lose sight of, but data is your power. When you have that data fully integrated, whether it be a superintendent or construction field team out in the field,
tracking. time and that time getting reported back to the job cost every single day. We know what we're spending on our labor, right? We know what what money's going in and out when it comes to labor.
We know that it's taking longer. We know from a scheduled perspective that the time has slipped and we need to put more people out there or maybe we need to pull people off and put them somewhere else that we're losing money. The integrated solutions that are available today are wide and they're varied.
But find one that integrates with your accounting solution. Find one that's easy to use and your your field team likes because if they don't like it,
they won't use it. You know, I've worked in tech for quite a while and it's it's amazing to me how many people will kind of just buy a solution, not think about the integration piece, and then they'll have to rip it out and absolutely they will.
There's no refunds on those solutions. That's months and months of money lost. There's not. Or the time you tried to put into implementing that solution that now doesn't work. Yes. I think that's great advice is setting it up for growth,
essentially. One last question for you. It's kind of a fun one. You've been in the space for a long time. What do you think is going to be the big trend over the next five years in the construction space?
I don't know. this is so fun, because there's massive investment going into the construction industry, not only in software, but in hardware out in the field. And most of my time was spent on job sites,
right? In construction trailers, working directly with those workers, safety was a huge issue. And I think it continues to garner more momentum and to create safer environments for our construction workers out in the field.
I think... that very large machinery is going to be automated and construction will always be a people first industry, always, but as that gains momentum, there will be technology,
giant technology that will help keep construction workers safe on the job. And I think that's the biggest step we're gonna make. - I like it. Well, Tammy, thanks so much for giving us your insights on how technology tweaks can transform a business.
I really... really think this is something every contractor listening can use to start changing their business right away with some of the nuggets that you left in this episode. So as always to our listeners,
thank you so much for tuning in to the Constructing Growth Podcast with QuickBooks Solution Providers. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to like and subscribe and share it with your construction colleagues to learn more about the QuickBooks Solution Providers and how they can help you transform your business.
please visit QuickBooksPartnersolutions .com. Tammy, thanks so much again for being on. I really appreciate it. It was a great time. Happy to be here. Thanks, Nate. Thanks. The views, information,
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