Archive for Dec, 2010

Our slides on vWorkApp from the ‘iPads in Business’ conference.

We’re pleased to announce that we have released vWork 2.5 this evening. There are a number of changes but the biggest is that the settings tab has been moved and renamed to the “Admin” tab.  It contains your templates, your workers and we have added a new section called: “Customers”.

This new area allows you to add all of your customers to vWork.  In a few weeks, we will make some additional changes that will enable you to choose a customer from a list when creating a new job.  This should make job creation a lot faster for you.

New customers can contain as little or as much information as you want.  We try and keep things as efficient as possible, so for a minimum you will just need to type a Customer Name.  We will create a unique ID for them automatically.  (You can change this ID to one of your own if you wish.)

If you enter a default delivery address, new jobs created for this customer will also be able to use this address automatically.

If you would like a hand setting any of this up, please drop us an email.

OK, how can I get your attention?  How about: Bill an extra 30 minutes a day and double your profits!  Steak knives not included…no motivational tapes either.

Just so we’re all clear, yes this is a shameless plug for our product and I yes will make a few sweeping generalisations but I never cease to be surprised by the importance of managing staff utilisation in a broadly fixed-cost services business.  The more go-ahead business owners we meet are totally on to this and focus their operations very sharply on driving those billable hours.

Let’s look at some back-of-the-envelope figures:

You’re a services business with 7 vans on the road.  Your guys are doing, on average 3 jobs a day and billing around $700k annually.  Your costs come in at $600k so your clearing around $100k.

Now let’s increase billable hours by 10%, revenue goes to $770.  OK your costs will rise a little – more petrol and you’ve employed some efficiency tools (ours!) so let’s say $620.  By my calculation that pushes your profit up 50% to $150k.

Or to put it another way, when you are running a fixed cost business it’s the last hour in the day that delivers the cream.

So crunching the numbers is the easy bit.  Our vWork product is designed to help you with the hard bit.  We put your work and staff all on the same map.  This drives much better scheduling and dispatch decisions all geared toward finding that extra 30 minutes of billable time every day.

You can sign up for a free vWork Lite account today or drop us an email for a free trial of the full version of vWork.