Quotes in Word. Hours on a note in the van. Extra work agreed on site and found back somewhere in WhatsApp, or not. The accountant who has to chase missing invoices every quarter.
If you run a construction company with five or ten people, you probably recognise at least one of those. With that question in mind, I went to Odoo Experience at Brussels Expo on Saturday, the biggest business software event in Europe. I could only attend the last of the three days, but even that one day was packed with stands and talks. I wanted to find out what is possible today for companies like yours.
Plenty of big stories, little about the site
Walking around the event, you mostly see big names. Retail chains with dozens of shops, manufacturers with thousands of parts, international groups moving away from SAP. Interesting, but far from a contractor who does his invoices at the kitchen table in the evening.
I went through the program of all three days. There were a few talks about construction and field work, but none was specifically about small contractors. And among the stands I found no Flemish software partner focused on construction companies of your size.
That is no criticism of the organisers. It does show that small construction companies often fall out of view in that world, while they are the ones losing the most time to paperwork.
What big projects teach about small companies
Still, I went home with lessons that fit a five-person construction company perfectly. They came from people who guided projects with hundreds or thousands of users, and they all said the same thing.
- Someone inside your company has to own it. Introducing software doesn't work if everything is left to the supplier. In a small construction company that is often the owner, or the person who does the admin. Plan a fixed half hour a week during the start-up period, and things run much more smoothly.
- Start small. Trying to change everything at once gets you stuck. Start with quotes and invoices, because that saves time right away and gets you paid faster. Hours per site and crew planning come later.
- Perfect on day one doesn't exist. The first weeks are for fine-tuning. Whatever still rubs, you solve together, step by step. Knowing that upfront makes it far less frustrating.
- Give everyone only what they need. A worker on site doesn't need to make invoices. Entering his hours and a photo on his phone is enough. The fewer buttons, the bigger the chance he actually uses it.
And if you hesitate because your old accounting sits in Winbooks or another package: that history can move to a new system today. At the event I met a specialised partner for exactly that.
What now?
With Linck IT I focus on exactly the companies that fall out of view at an event like this: Flemish contractors with five to ten people who want to lose less time on admin. Close by, in Dutch, and in small steps you stay in control of.
Do you recognise yourself in the start of this story? Then I'm happy to talk for twenty minutes, no strings attached, about where you lose the most time today. Sometimes the answer is a new system, sometimes a small change to how you work now is enough.