Using real time location systems can help you to make sure you’re billing clients for the correct amount of time spent on their site, and can provide you with the datasets to prove it.
How can it work?
Real time location systems can detect the precise moment your employee arrives and starts a task on a customer site, which starts the stopwatch for billable time. A system such as Sense recognises this, as well as marking the moment when the task is completed.
Voila! You have an accurate record of the time that your employee was carrying out a task on your customers behalf. But so far, that’s elementary…
If you want to go a step further, Sense can also enrich “time of arrival” data with an activity breakdown during the task. For example, by showing a map of areas visited by that employee while they were on the clock. Then by cross-checking these location stamps with which tasks are getting marked off. Or by recording how long each task took, what equipment got checked in or out, and what a person’s movement patterns looked like while undertaking each activity.
With Sense, you could – if needed – generate an activity report to attach to your invoice, to clearly demonstrate all of this information to your customers.
Why it can be useful
Firstly, it gives you the ability to share evidence of work with customers. This helps to protect your employees and your business if false claims or complaints are made. It also helps to demonstrate the value of your work to your customer. Like I mentioned earlier, reports can go as far as showing the rooms an employee visited, how long they spent there, the task list they worked through and how long it took them. This is great for workforces such as cleaners, or engineers.
Secondly, even if you don’t share the report with customers, it helps you to know you’re charging the correct amount. If your engineer spends eight hours on a site doing a job which you’ve only billed £25 for, then you’re probably not charging enough. By comparing time spent on jobs with other information, such the billable amount, you can adjust pricing as needed to make sure you’re maintaining healthy margins.
Thirdly, real time location systems allow you to be more granular with your billing… if you want to. In price competitive industries, being able to charge accurately to the minute, instead of by the hour, can give you an advantage when trying to win new business and when retaining customers.
Finally, (on a slightly unrelated note) by using RTLS to improve your invoicing, you can also begin to attribute revenue to individual employees. This is valuable information for several reasons. It helps you to learn which employees are the most productive. This allows you to reward them adequately and focus on retaining them. It also shows your company who needs extra training or support.
Getting started
To begin improving your invoicing with a real time location system, speak to a member of the Sense team. We can help you to figure out the most effective way to implement a real time location system to benefit your employees and your business.
