Date Posted: 10/28/2002
Service Industry Project Management & Scheduling
Service Job Project Management & Scheduling
The Air Conditioning and Refrigeration industry is often made up of relatively small companies that need to have the flexibility to move between installation projects, unscheduled repair jobs, and scheduled maintenance work. As a result, accounting and administration systems often go into overload trying to cope with this diversity of operations, and as a result, overhead costs can often cause a profit ?squeeze?.
TradePac software is one of the very few systems that integrates all these essential accounting and management information systems into a single package, without costing you an arm and a leg. TradePac has been installed in Air Conditioning and Refrigeration companies across Australia.
Recent Installation :
Another recent installation was in Perth, Western Australia. This company installed the standard TradePac-Service system which includes the scheduled service contracts and maintenance module.
Property Database :
They have also integrated the optional Property Database. This allows jobs to be linked to a (commercial) property so that you can then view a history of work done at each property.
It also provides for the situation where you can be doing work for several clients in relation to a single property (the Property Strata Manager, the Landlord, the Tenant, or an Insurance company).
The same property database also interfaces to the client site addresses in relation to where equipment is installed, and the subject of routine service contracts.
Scheduled Service :
The TradePac-Service system allows you to create multiple client site addresses, and at each address you can have multiple client equipment registers (type, make, model serial number).
In addition, each site address can have several service contracts attached, providing routine services for multiple periods (eg. monthly, quarterly, annually). The system creates these related job records automatically, and also updates the schedule of upcoming jobs to be completed.
Work tickets can be printed individually, or as a group.
Job invoices can be created individually, or on an automatic basis.
Job Reporting :
There are hundreds of existing report designs to choose from. However, a recent software enhancement (provided free of charge to TradePac customers) is the new ?Work in Progress Report Configurator?. This allows Users to design their own reports without any knowledge of database designs or software programming.
The first step is to decide what fields (columns) you want printed across the page. A list of some one hundred data fields is displayed for you to choose from. These include cost, sales, profit, and quantity information (budget, actual, and variances). It is also includes contract prices, variations, invoiced, balance outstanding, and to be invoiced fields.
The choice of what prints on each report design is up to you, so that you might find that you have separate reports especially for Project Managers, as opposed to General Management. Job records printed can be sorted into virtually sort sequence(s). This might be by job number, scheduled start date, project manager, client ? or indeed any combination of these fields.
You can also define which job records are to be selected. This may be done by job status, project manager, salesperson, client, branch (if applicable), job type, job category, or simply by a job number range.
Software Pricing :
TradePac prices start with their ?Lite? version at $995. This still integrates job costing, estimating, quoting, stock/purchasing, and all the normal accounting functions. This price can be reduced further with the Trade-In (net $495).
Standard TradePac with the added ?Service? software module ?as a multi user network version costs $ 4,795 (regardless of the number of network users you have !).
However, to estimate the total cost of your system you need to add the annual software support licence, plus implementation & training services. These are likely to bring the total cost up to around $2,500 (in the case of the Lite system), and close to $10,000 for multi user version (before the Trade-In allowance of up to $1,000).
In addition, it may be prudent to provide for the contingency fund for some software personalisation of the database (and reports ?) to suit your exact requirements.
Rent, and Rent to Own options :
There is also the options of the ?Software Rental? which can be as low as $26.85 per month for the Lite version, and around $144 for the network version.
Another alternate to outright purchase is the ?Rent to Own? option. Here the software and support licence can be purchased over eleven monthly payments, based on 10% of the software & support cost.
Guarantees :
TradePac offer two guarantees. One is a 30 day money back guarantee (with some conditions), and the other is a ?lifetime? guarantee that the standard software package is supplied free from any software errors.
About TradePac :
The company commenced business nearly twenty years ago. They are past winners of the Australian Small Business Award. TradePac sell and support their own software directly (mostly via the phone, fax, modem, and internet).
Further details may also be obtained via the ?Guided Tour? available on the TradePac web site.
Contact : Clive Rainbow at TradePac.
Phone (02) 9977 8600, Fx 9977-8117
Email : clive@tradepac.com.au Web Site : www.tradepac.com.au
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