Why construction companies need to automate their data

In today's digital age, data is gold. However, the construction industry hasn’t made use of this important resource. It isn’t hard to understand why, since most construction data lives in silos. It’s trapped in paper receipts, email inboxes, spreadsheets, and desktops. It’s already a huge task to close the books in a given month and make sure everyone is submitting their reports in a timely manner. With a slow, scattered pipeline of data, it’s no wonder that construction hasn’t been able to capitalize on this key resource yet. 

While this method of managing documentation used to be necessary, it isn’t anymore. Technology specializes in cleaning up your workflows, structuring your systems, and unifying your data into a single source. Construction companies that invest in these tools can see significant gains in operational efficiency, forecasting accuracy, and the speed of their monthly close. Best of all, when all of your data is unified, you’ll be able to fully leverage the power of data analytics and use it to enhance your profit. 

Although the value of organizing your data is undeniable, companies may not be clear on where to start. Luckily, the data science revolution is well underway in most other industries. That means there are already reliable, tried and true digital tools construction companies can deploy to get their data in order. Let’s go over how construction companies can organize their data for better business performance.

Automate and win

One of the most challenging aspects of organizing data is the time it takes to do it all. Your clerks, accountants, and project managers already spend hundreds of hours every month in spreadsheets. Getting any member of the team to go through even more sheets to sort out all the information inside is a huge undertaking. The problem gets even worse when you add in things like an ERP or a CRM. It’s another source of data somebody will need to take information from and copy into a spreadsheet. This is why organizing financial information into a single source hasn’t been feasible until now. There’s too much labor involved. Fortunately for construction, the advent of data analytics has created a way to move past this operational barrier.

The solution to the problem is to cut manual data entry out of the equation entirely. Instead of adding more tasks to your team's workload, it’s time to leverage financial automation. Financial automation tools can retrieve your key data from wherever it’s located and organize it for you. It goes beyond the standard software connectors the industry is used to. These automation tools can extract information from invoices, digital receipts, your ERP, and almost anything else your team would be able to access. Unlike typical connectors, automation isn’t constrained to any one type of connection or data point. It can copy anything by replicating the same actions a clerk would, and even push that data back into a spreadsheet or another piece of software. 

Not only does this automation save your team precious resources, but it also allows you to fully organize your financial data. Now, your company is no longer depending on each individual employee to move information around. Instead, financial automation is pulling the data for them and turning it into a single source of truth for your business. With all of your data unified in one place, you can begin to analyze trends, improve the accuracy of your forecasts and get valuable business insights that make the most out of the information you have. 

To learn more about how you can use the data you’ve collected, the ways it can enhance your business, and the tools that can help you bring it all together, check out our guide to data analytics in construction.

Interested in finding the right financial automation tool for your business? Speak with our experts here and find out how Briq can help your construction business automate and win.