Fergus Site Visits Guide

Help Guide Site Visits

2 Fergus Site Visits Guide

Fergus Site Visits Guide Draft Version

Published 18/04/15


Table of contents

PART 1 -‐ WHAT IS A SITE VISIT? 4

BENEFITS OF A SITE VISIT 4 SITE VISITS ON THE STATUS BOARD

PART TWO -‐ MAKING USE OF SITE VISITS 6

STEP 1 -‐ CREATING A SITE VISIT 7 STEP 2 -‐ CUSTOMIZING THE SITE VISIT 8 STEP 3 -‐ ASSIGNING AND SCHEDULING 9 STEP 4 -‐ ADD LABOUR 17 ENTERING TIME THROUGH THE MOBILE APP 18 ENTERING TIME THROUGH THE JOB CARD 20 ENTERING TIME THROUGH THE EMPLOYEES DASHBOARD 22 STEP 5 -‐ ADDING MERCHANT MATERIALS 24 STEP 6 -‐ ADDING PURCHASE ORDERS 25 STEP 7 -‐ ADDING STOCK ON HAND 27 STEP 8 -‐ MARK AS COMPLETE 29 STEP 9 -‐ SITE VISIT NOTES & QUERIES 31 SITE VISIT NOTES 31 SITE VISIT QUERIES 32 STEP 10 -‐ PRINT JOB CARDS 34 STEP 11 -‐ VOIDING SITE VISITS OR UNMARKING AS COMPLETE 35 VOIDING A SITE VISIT 35 UNMARKING AS TO INVOICE. 35


Site Visits For new users to Fergus, a Site Visit can be challenging to understand, but once you get the hang of it you will see how powerful they are for your workflow. Part 1 Explains conceptually what a Site Visit is and how it fits within Fergus Part 2 Goes through the all the individual parts that make up a Site Visit

Part 1 - What is a Site Visit? Site Visits are one of the main unique parts of Fergus and allow us a lot of flexibility in managing our jobs. To understand what a Site Visit is it is first important to touch on what is the driving purpose of Fergus. One of the main problems Fergus tries to solve is determining if the jobs we finished made money or not. This simple yet challenging goal has meant that Fergus has evolved to create an environment that helps you track and manage every aspect of the job and business; from quoting and scheduling to filling out time-sheets and back costing. At the end of the day Fergus strives to make it simple for you to track the difference between what the job cost versus what you invoiced the customer.

Important Note: A site visit is where you record all the costs incurred on each job, this is all the labour and materials for that project.

Site visits help you to reach this goal by allowing you to partition the job into multiple site visits, this allows you to break the job down into its parts and manage each part of the job in relative isolation. The reason this is important is if the job lost money then where exactly did it lose money? Was it during the foundations, was it the first fix or the second fix? All of these can be separated into different site visits meaning that it is easier to identify the places to look for inefficiencies. For example: If you have one site visit on a $50,000 job that took 10 months and you lost money on the job, where would you start to interrogate the data if it was one big list. However if you have 20 site visits, with one for every part of the project you can compare the hours and materials against the quote and find out where the job went wrong.

Benefits of a site visit ● You can invoice one or multiple site visits at any time and the job still remains open. ● Site visits can be in many different states according to the size of the project, e.g.: it is perfectly normal to have

some site visits invoiced, some still in progress and a few left to schedule. ● Like on any big job there is a lot going on and you need to be able to manage what is happening today, what is

happening next week and also what has happened. Site Visits can help break that up as well. ● You can't always invoice what the job cost

○ As an example, lets say you quoted $50.00 for a job but the job cost $60.00. You can only invoice $50.00. This means you have to separate the costs from the charges and this is the flexibility a site visit allows.

Site Visits on the Status Board Because we have a site visit we can now manage the reality of what is happening on a project, instead of managing a list we can manage by priority. The status board presents an overview of where all your jobs are at right now.


When information is exposed in the right way you get what we call Visibility, what needs doing and by whom? Once you can see what needs to be done you can then put someone in charge of doing it! All of a sudden Fergus gives you the information you need to improve your own internal organisational structure and can start redefining what people in your company are supposed to do by assigning them work in the status board. Because you have a box on the status board and a person in charge of a box then you have taken care of a fundamental rule of managing people which is “Tell me what to do” in that once a person knows what to do they will generally do their best to achieve the outcomes. What the status board also does is to provide accountability, once a person knows what they have to do, they have to be managed to make sure they do what they are asked. By exposing the information on a status board for the whole company it becomes obvious who is and isn't doing their tasks, so now you have self management out of the social pressure to keep up to the mark because it is obvious that is either done or not done and if you work in an office you know that everyone generally likes to work in harmony and to be held in high esteem.

Note: This is the concept of Collective Responsibility versus Individual or Silo Management.

From the site visit concept we have also been able to bring in all the other requirements that are required in a job management package such as; Purchase Orders, Scheduling, Entering Materials, Entering Labour. With all this working in concordance you can now work on the individual part of any job and all the data will come together to give a complete picture of the job. I hope this was helpful in understanding the reasoning behind site visits. Our goal was to provide a clear way to divide up jobs into manageable chunks that allow better accountability and visibility into the job. In Part Two we will look a bit deeper and see how we can make use of site visits on a job.


Part Two - Making use of Site Visits This section will go over how a site visit is created and used in a job and all the various parts that make it up. We will go over each of the following steps in this section to give you a feel for how the site visit is used:

1. Creating a site visit 2. Customizing the site visit 3. Assigning and Scheduling 4. Adding Labour 5. Adding Merchant Materials 6. Adding Purchase Orders 7. Adding Stock on Hand 8. Mark as Complete options and other tool bar options 9. Site Visit Notes & Queries 10. Print Job Cards 11. Voiding a Site Visit or Unmarking as Complete

The following image gives us a reference starting point on the Fergus Job Card where most of the above steps will take place:


Step 1 - Creating a Site Visit

1. Press the green Create Site Visit button - this will create a new site visit on the job and assign it a new suffix 2. As you can see we have just created Site Visit C as A & B had already been created.

a. When the original job was created it was given the order number FAV-7. When you create the site visit we add a letter to the job, this site visit is FAV-7C.

3. This is important because when you order materials from the merchant you tell the merchant the job number and letter, without the letter you have to spend a bit more time working out what site visit to put the costs against.

Note: There is no limit to the amount of site visits you create.

Normally most people create Site Visits for chunks of work, such as Pre Slab, First Fix. Builders on large jobs will create one a month for the staff and individual ones for the sub-contractors. e.g.: Site Visit 7c might be the order number the plumber gives to the concrete cutter, all costs from the concrete cutter are recorded on this site visit and then you can check that what you were charged is in alignment with what you quoted.


Step 2 - Customizing the site visit You can change the site visit title by clicking on the heading at the top of the site visit e.g.:

This heading is editable, click in here to change the description to suit the type of work that is going to be undertaken. This descriptions is the heading that will appear on the mobile device when it is scheduled. You can also change the site description as in the image below:

Clicking on the text below the Site Visit Description will allow you to edit it and change it to suit. By default the description of the job is entered. This description is also what will appear on the mobile device when you schedule it.


Step 3 - Assigning and Scheduling For this example we have created a new project called Replace Broken Tap. Once you have created a Site Visit it will appear orange on the Status board Scheduling as in the example below. Orange denotes that you have something to schedule.

On the job card we want to assign it to someone and then we want to schedule the job to that person.

Note: You can schedule first and then find the person who had time to do it later. In this example we will do it this way.

1. On the site visit we can see the heading Schedule this site visit and two buttons that are available; Assign

Person/Group or Schedule Site Visit as below:


2. Next we will choose Assign Person or Group as we know the person we want to do this job by clicking on the

Assign Person/Group button:

Note: There is a difference between groups and individuals - If you know who you want to do a particular job you can assign a person or a group to do that job. If you assign it to a group then the manager in charge of that group is then responsible for scheduling it to people within that group.

3. Once we have selected a staff member (in this case we will choose Dan Pollard) we will be able to see that they

have been assigned on the status board. Assigned staff members will be filterable on the status board by using the filter in the top right. Here we have selected Dan Pollard to show all jobs assigned to him.

4. If you go to the calendar, you will now also see that the job appears under Dan Pollard to be scheduled:


:

5. The jobs also appear on the mobile device as either unscheduled or unassigned (Unscheduled means it has been assigned to your login, unassigned means it is a job for anyone to access):

6. Now that we have assigned Dan Pollard to the job we can see their name under the scheduling area in the site visit:


7. Now we want to schedule Dan to do this work, we will press the Schedule Site Visit button. This will open up Dans Calendar for the week:

8. You can see the name Dan on the left and a purple job under it, if you grab this job with your mouse you can drag it to a spot on the calendar that is free:


9. Once this is done, press the X in the top left to close the calendar window.

Tip! ● The job has stayed in the left hand side so you can drag it to multiple times to multiple days. ● Back on the job card you can assign to multiple people and groups, if you do this multiple people would now

appear on this calendar pop-up. ● Once you close the calendar pop-up, the events under that name will disappear on the left hand side.

10. This is how the site visit should now look:

11. We can let the customer know when we are coming by SMS or by Email by clicking on the SMS and Email icons in the site visit menu bar:


12. Clicking on the email icon will pop up a email dialog for you to customise the outgoing message to your customer:

Note: You can configure the default email template under Settings > Email > Email Templates

13. Press the Send email to confirm this email and send it to the customer.

14. If you want to SMS (Text or Short Message Service) press the SMS icon and a similar looking popup will display

allowing you to customise the outgoing SMS message:


15. Press the Send SMS to send this message to the customer. Please note that there is a cost for this service within Fergus.

Note: You can configure the default SMS templates by going to Settings > SMS > Templates

16. Once it has been sent you can see that the job has moved in the status bar on the site visit To Start and that in

green it now reads Schedule sent:

17. If we go back to the status board, we can see that the job is now green because it has been scheduled:

18. The next step shows what the status board will look like if the job isn't started on time (in this example I rescheduled the event prior to the time):


Note: If a tradesperson is scheduled to go to a job at 8.00am in the morning and they don't put time on their mobile device or start their timer on the mobile device then the job will go red as above. If the job is red you will have to follow up with the tradesman and see if he did go and just didn't put his time in or if he did not go and you need to reschedule with the customer (you may now have a grumpy customer!).


Step 4 - Add Labour In this section we will cover off the different ways to add Labour onto a site visit:

● Through the mobile app ● Through the job card ● Through the employees dashboard

The mobile device is where we want to encourage tradesperson to enter their time, this is mainly good workflow practice but also because it is so easy to do on the mobile device. For example on the mobile device you can either press the Start timer or the + Button to easily add time on a job. If they press the start timer the job in the status board the site visit will move to green in the In progress column:


Entering time through the mobile app 1. Press the + button on the app:

2. This will popup a dialog box where you can enter the date, start time, end time, description and any uncharged time allocations:

3. Press the Save button in the top right to add this to the site visit - This will ask you to confirm whether the job is labour complete or whether you need to come back as below:


4. For this scenario we will choose I need to come back. Because the labour hasn't yet been scheduled to return, the site visit has gone orange in the In progress column on the dashboard. This means you have to check the job as to why and rearrange with the customer another visit:

5. In the next screenshot I have redone the labour entry but this time I have pressed My work is complete:


. I This has now moved the job over to Costing confirmation rather than being stuck In Progress

Tip! Costing confirmation is where you want to be checking the labour and labour descriptions, you also want to be checking all the materials as this is the most important step before invoicing. Spending a bit of time here will save you time when it comes to the invoicing stage.

Entering Time through the Job Card There is a permission to allow Tradespeople to enter time directly onto the site visit or if they must do it through the mobile device or desktop wizard. The reason for this distinction is that the mobile app or the desktop entry are a purpose built workflow that the tradespeople must complete. This will mean you have the best chance of capturing, time, materials and descriptions. As office people never do the actual work on site this restriction/permission is not required.

1. The following screenshot is of the desktop view with the site visit open on the labour tab - this is where you will create and edit labour entries on the site visit:


Tip! There is a permission to allow you to enter or edit time for someone else. Normally tradespeople would not have this permission enabled.

2. If you wanted to enter time onto the job, choose the person you are entering time for as it will default to your log

in.

3. Choose the date and enter your start and finish times.

4. Enter a description of the work done

5. Optionally select an uncharged reason and amount of uncharged time that was included in the time entry. In here you can enter breaks, travel, office work etc.

a. This uncharged time will be recorded against the job as a cost that won't be charged to the customer.

6. Press the + Add time entry button to save the time entry against the job as below:

7. If you need to edit or delete this time entry press the Pencil button or X button on the right.


Tip! Fergus does not allow overlapping time (it is impossible to be in two places at the same time). At the invoicing stage you can always add more hours if you need to. Site Visits are where you record time and materials, invoicing is where you take care of what you will charge the customer.

Entering time through the employees dashboard If the tradesperson does not have permission to enter time on the job card then they must do it this way. On their home dashboard on the Fergus website (accessed via web browser or iPad browser) they will see this view:

1. On the employees dashboard you can see a list of Today’s Jobs - Under each job there is a Start button or the + button. For this example we will press the + button to add a time entry to that job:


2. This form has to be filled out before it will be saved. If this form does not save then the Tradesperson’s time won't save and they won't get their Timesheet filled out.

3. Now we have filled out the labour, materials and a description and can now press the Save button to add it to the job.


Step 5 - Adding Merchant Materials

Note: Nearly all of the information on how to enter merchant materials has been covered in Merchant Materials Reconciliation. Please refer to that chapter for more detailed information.

1. In this screen shot, we are back on the site visit but this time we have clicked on the Purchases tab and this is

the view we see:

2. You would normally only come here if you have a actual invoice from a supplier or contractor to enter. To add a Supplier invoice or Credit press the Add New Purchase or Add New Credit buttons.

Important Tip! If you enter all your supplier invoices into Fergus, then Fergus posts these invoices into Xero for you to pay. The implication for this is: As an example let us say that a supplier sends you a statement with 5 invoices on the statement worth $1500.00. If in Xero there are only 3 invoices worth $800.00 this means that you have missed charging customers for two invoices from the supplier. You can then find the missing invoices, charge them to the customer. Once this is done then the balance in Xero will match and it is safe to pay your supplier $1500.00. This is a great check system to make sure everything you pay to your suppliers has been charged onto a job.


Step 6 - Adding Purchase Orders This section is about sending your suppliers an order for materials, you can request a price or a delivery of materials.

1. Back on the job card we will click on the Orders tab to bring up the area to create and manage Merchant purchase orders:

2. To add a purchase order press the Add New Purchase Order button:

3. A purchase order form will display allowing you to add the various details of the purchase order or allow you to copy items from an existing quote. If you want to search your price book or favourites for items to add you can click on the item editor to get started.

4. Once you have entered your materials, choose the delivery type what you want and add a description of any

special instructions for the merchant to follow - You should end up with something as below:


5. When you are done, press Email to select the merchant and send the purchase order off.

6. Once you are done the purchase order will appear in the Orders tab. You can view / edit and manage existing purchase orders from here:


Step 7 - Adding Stock on Hand Stock on hand is often added by the tradesperson in the field. This is also where you would add all the other charges that won't come from a supplier invoice, e.g.: Misc Charges, Screws, Silicone, Rubbish Disposal, Call Out Fees, Safety Certificates.

1. We’re back on the job card again and have selected the Stock on Hand / Other tab. This is where you go to see all stock on hand or unused stock:

2. Hopefully by now you have seen the search price books input field many times now and you are acquainted with it. You can start adding materials and labour into this input field as below:

3. Here we have searched for Labour and the search box found the shown matches - we will choose Tradesmen Labour for our example:


Tip! Next to the Tradesmen Labour there is a little person Icon, this denotes for reporting purpose on back costing if the cost are associated with labour or materials. You can change the icon by clicking on it to switch it between a material cost and a labour cost.

4. I have entered some materials and you can now see it has been tagged with a label icon to denote it’s a material

cost:

5. Keep adding all the materials that you require and you can obviously adjust each lines quantity, cost and sell price.

6. We will skip the Unused Stock table in this step as it is detailed much more in the Merchant Documents help

document.

Tip! There are permissions to restrict users from seeing cost and sell price and to be able to edit the prices as well, this in settings under each users permissions.


Step 8 - Mark As Complete In this chapter we will discuss how to move a job through to invoice.

This is a common sticking point and is the one real block that we can not automate in Fergus. There isn’t really anyway we can tell that you are happy to invoice a particular site visit. Even if you have entered and completed the labour and materials, we have decided against forcing the job to be moved into To Invoice as we feel at this point the user should have the flexibility to decide if the site visit is ready to be invoiced.

1. If you are satisfied that it is ready to be invoiced please press the tick box in the top menu - This will display the following dialog message:

2. On page 17 you can see that the job in the status board is orange awaiting someone to confirm that the job is ready to invoice. By pressing the Mark as To Invoice button it will move the job over into the next column.

Tip! With regards to the Manually Mark as Invoiced option - This option is here because sometimes you can't invoice a site visit. For example if the site visit was created because you had to go back and fix something under warranty then you don't want to delete the costs yet you can't invoice it to the customer either. This job would end up sitting on your status board in the Costing stage. In order to move it along it you can press Manually Mark as Invoiced to get it to resolve. This way all the costs are also recorded accurately for back costing.

3. Below is an example of a job after it has been marked as To Invoice:


4. For more information on Invoicing please read the chapter on Invoicing at what to do next with this job.


Step 9 - Site Visit Notes & Queries

Site Visit Notes All throughout Fergus there is the ability to raise notes, there is a whole chapter on notes but we will touch on it in this chapter to save you having to read that chapter.

1. The image below shows the site visit card with the notes section that will show any notes logged against the site visit:

2. If you want to make a note about this Site Visit to inform someone else of some information they need to know about this job. Click into the notes field to pop up a note dialog box:

3. You can see we have entered a note, and we have also used the @ symbol. This is very handy as it will notify that person that they have a message from someone in the company that needs to be actioned.

4. We are also going to pin this note to show you what happens if you pin a note:

5. The note is now visible on the site visit for everyone to view when they open the site visit.

6. The note you @mentioned somebody will now show up for them under the red notification icon in the top menu. If you press on the red dot it will open to show you all the messages you have been notified in. This notification will also include a link to the respective job that it was raised on:


Site Visit Queries A query note is different to a normal note it will raise the status of the job and will make it clear to everyone that an action is important and needs to be looked at.

1. In the toolbar on the site visit there is a red flag. Press the red flag to add a query.

2. This will popup a query dialog form where you can enter your query details and optionally @ notify someone if you want:

3. Once you have entered the query press the Save button. This will appear on the job as below:


4. This query is automatically pinned to the job. It is worth noting that it is very easy for the tradesperson to raise query notes from the mobile app.

5. Now that we have queried this site visit it will be moved to a Queried status on the status board as below:

6. This query function behaves the same no matter which stage the Site Visit is at and whoever creates one will change the status of the job.

7. To remove the Queried status go into the job and press Resolve query to remove this status.


Step 10 - Print Job Cards If you do not have your tradespersons on a mobile device you can print a job card.

1. To print a job card press the Printer icon button in the site visit menu bar:

2. If you press the Printer icon button you will get a similar view to the image below:

3. Press the Print button to print the job card.

4. The printed job card contains the same workflow as the mobile device workflow. When the job card is handed in you can enter all the materials into the job and achieve all the same reporting and status updates.


Step 11 - Voiding SIte Visits or Unmarking as Complete

Voiding a Site Visit If you have created a site visit by mistake and you want to get rid of it, you can void it to remove it from the status board. This will not delete any costs on the site visit, all it will do is remove it from the status board and minimise its importance on the Job. (You can always bring a site visit back if need be by un-voiding it later).

1. To void the site visit press the rubbish bin icon on the menu in the site visit:

2. When you press the rubbish bin icon a pop will ask for a reason as to why:

3. The job card will now look like this showing one voided site visit:

Unmarking as To Invoice. If the job has been Marked as to invoice but you have decided that “no this is not right” and you want to move it back, this is what this step will explain how to do.

1. Below we can see that FAV-9a is in the To Invoice status:


2. On the menu bar there is a padlock key, press the padlock button to bring up the following popup:

3. Click the Unmark as complete button to move the site visit back into In Progress.

4. Now that you have done that the site visit has now been moved back to In Progress and you can undertake the actions that you require; Rescheduling, adding more materials etc: