Friday Fives: fault history, worksheet checks, allowances costed

Someone texts or emails a serial number, an asset reference or a model, and asks what's gone wrong with it before. Build Concierge finds every previous attendance against that asset and replies with the history: the date, the job reference, who attended, what the fault was and what was done about it. No login, no searching, no ringing round.

The history is usually sitting in your system already. Getting at it means someone with the right access, in front of a screen, with time to look, which is rarely the person standing in front of the machine.

• Whoever's making the decision has the history in front of them within seconds, wherever they are
• An engineer knows what was tried last time before they start
• Repair-or-replace calls get made on the record rather than on a hunch

Ask the machine what happened before →

An engineer finishes a visit and answers the worksheet question that decides what happens next: is further work needed, or is this job done? That single answer sets the job's outcome and decides whether anything gets priced. Build Concierge reads the engineer's own report and photos, compares them against the answer they gave, and flags it when the two don't agree.

It's rarely carelessness. It's the last box on a long day, and the consequence of getting it wrong is revenue that was identified on site and quietly lost at close-down.

• Work that needs quoting gets quoted
• The answer that closes a job down is checked against the evidence next to it, on every job
• The engineer finds out while the detail is fresh rather than three weeks later

Check the answer against the report →

Where work is raised as a group of related jobs, Build Concierge keeps the group together. A note added once appears against every job in the group rather than just the one someone happened to open. And when the work completes, each job in the group is checked back against the quote it belongs to, so what was quoted, what was done and what's being billed all line up before anything is invoiced.

The group only really exists at the point it's created. After that every job is on its own, which is how a conversation recorded on one job stays invisible on the other eleven.

• The group behaves like one piece of work, because that's what it is
• Anyone opening any job in it sees the full picture
• Reconciliation happens before the invoice rather than after the query

Keep the group together →

Build Concierge reads the attendance, works out whether it qualifies as a night shift under your rules, and posts the right allowance to the job automatically. Shift and unsocial-hours uplifts land as costed lines against the job, coded the way your accounts need them, without anyone checking a timesheet against a rate card.

Allowances get missed because nobody spotted the finish time, and they get applied inconsistently depending on who processed the job. Both problems are found at the end of the month, by which point somebody is rebuilding a week of timesheets.

• Every qualifying attendance carries its allowance, on the day, at the right rate
• Engineers are paid correctly without chasing
• Job costs reflect what the work actually cost you, so margin figures are real

Let the allowance take care of itself →

A survey or inspection report arrives with dozens of findings written in an engineer's or a surveyor's own words. Build Concierge reads it, matches each finding against your own categories, counts how many fall into each, and returns the totals ready to price. Your categories, your rules, including which category wins when a finding could fall into two.

Done by hand it means reading the whole report with a tally sheet, which takes hours and gives a different answer depending on who reads it.

• A report becomes a priced schedule the day it lands, not the week after
• Every finding is categorised the same way regardless of who wrote it up
• Nothing is double counted, and nothing is missed because of unfamiliar wording

Turn the report into a priced schedule →