Within the construction products distribution and services industry, job sheets form a crucial part of the lien management chain. But too often the workflow for managing job sheets falls short. Job sheets come in with too little or the wrong information, and creditors struggle to keep that information tracked, updated, and synchronized across multiple systems.
Missing information can cost you efficiency and customer satisfaction as you go through back-and-forth exchanges and prolonged approvals. But more troubling, shortcomings in job sheet processing can lead to errors on liens, missed lien filings, and increased risk for those liens to default.
Fortunately, there are proven steps you can take to make your job sheet workflow efficient and effective, keeping you and your customers satisfied and your liens on track. By shoring up how you collect and store project information and how you track the resulting liens, you can drastically improve your risk optimization and your productivity overall.
What Are Job Sheets?
A job sheet collects essential information about a construction project with the goal of securing and maintaining a lien quickly and accurately. As a credit professional, you are likely to encounter a job sheet when a customer needs credit to take on a new project in addition to any already-approved projects the customer has.
With a good job sheet, all the information you need to make the credit decision comes up front, making the whole process seamless and efficient. But if you are getting incomplete job sheets, or your workflow for processing job sheets falls short, you could face time-consuming customer callbacks, delayed credit approvals, missed lien deadlines, and defaults.
Proven Strategies for Effective Job Sheet Management
Putting Together the Job Sheet Form
Collecting precisely the information you need up front is key to an efficient job sheet workflow. Otherwise, you open yourself to the time-consuming process of reaching back out to customers for more information—a bad customer experience besides. Left unchecked, an inadequate job sheet form lays a foundation for delayed approvals, inaccurate project information, and failed liens.
The first step to getting the right information is having a fine-tuned job sheet form. You want to collect the information you need without going so far that you bog down the customer with unnecessary data collection. What that means depends on your needs, but you may find a helpful start in the following set of commonly used fields:
- Job amount
- Customer account number
- Project name
- Project description
- Project type (public, private, commercial, federal, etc.)
- Job location—address, including city, state, and zip code
- Job financing, bonding, and tax exemption statuses
- Site information
- Project estimated start date
- Project estimated end date
- Customer role
- Applicant information
Be aware that some states may have specific lien filing requirements in addition to the fields above. Capturing the required information on the job sheet form further ensures your liens filings are prompt and accurate. Ultimately, no resource is a substitute for your state’s full lien laws—you need to refer to those for definitive information. But for an overview of state lien requirements, you can use a resource like USLegal’s State Laws for Construction Liens. Lien management providers like the ones below also provide a range of assets that can be helpful in navigating state requirements:
- Handle includes a Construction Resources page covering each state with wide ranging topics and solutions.
- Levelset provides a free downloadable resource with State-by-state License Requirements to File a Lien.
- NCS Credit offers a PDF resource listing Lien & Suit Deadlines for Construction Projects.
In addition to having the right data, you need to ensure that your form renders information consistently and accurately. Digital forms have a superlative advantage here. Typed fields guarantee legibility, and many digital forms can validate and enforce required fields and field formatting.
Digital job sheet forms can range from PDF documents submitted by email to website forms, all the way to integrated solutions within an end-to-end credit platform. While your solution will vary based on your needs, the more of the process you can manage in a single, integrated workflow, the more efficiency and risk optimization you can take advantage of.
With an integrated digital workflow, you have a system that:
- Enables easy updates so that project information is current and relevant.
- Reduces redundancy so that you save time and cut down on data misalignment.
- Keeps data accessible so that you can act on it quickly and efficiently.
Curious what an end-to-end integrated solution looks like? Learn more.
Evaluating Job Sheets Efficiently
Credit professionals and their experience undeniably form the backbone of quality credit management. They develop informed, risk-reducing decisions by applying their analytical skills to the unique combinations of job information, customer profile, and economic climate.
Within the creditor’s process, a few key areas stand out in particular for making effective credit decisions from job sheets:
- Evaluate the customer’s standing. What does their credit history reveal? Do they have the appropriate coverage? How is their financial health and payment history?
- Verify the project viability and the job collateral. Does the customer have the necessary allocations and certifications to complete the job? Is the collateral sufficient?
- Assess the potential risks in the job. What variables in the market, in the job itself, and in the environment could negatively affect the project? What would these variables’ respective impacts be?
To bring together all the pieces into a whole picture of viability and risk, credit management requires time and focus. But with a wealth of incoming information, those can be difficult to come by. More so when document maintenance and manual tracking leave creditors constantly busy elsewhere.
A streamlined job sheet and lien management workflow can provide support that enables credit professionals like you to direct attention and energy where they make the most difference. When it comes to streamlining your workflow for more effective assessments, the following factors are crucial:
- Consolidation. The best systems for managing project and lien data keep relevant information organized and accessible from within a single interface. By eliminating time spent searching for information between several sources, you are freed to focus more energy on priority customers and high-risk accounts.
- Synchronization. To be useful, information needs to be up-to-date, which can be challenging as the project life cycle advances and input from additional systems and services is necessary. An integrated solution can bring disparate updates together automatically, helping you make quicker and more accurate decisions.
A platform like Bectran’s brings these qualities together to dramatically improve efficiency. You always know where to gather and update information and spend less time coordinating data across different systems. Further still, you lower the likelihood of data becoming misaligned and out of date across sources, facilitating your approvals and reducing the likelihood of failed liens.
Creditors taking advantage of a credit platform with automated features can eliminate even more of the busy work. Platforms like Bectran’s help you optimize risk with automated decision making based on your own predefined criteria, and with Bectran’s lien filing integrations, you can track and manage every stage of a project’s life cycle within the same easy-to-use dashboard.
Maintaining Effective Lien Tracking
Once a lien has been filed, your key to reducing risk is keeping an up-to-date record of the lien’s status, deadlines, and other requirements. Without a robust system for tracking liens, gathering the right information is likely to be time-consuming and filings are susceptible to missed data and deadlines.
For the most effective lien tracking, you need a system that easily tracks and reports on liens, providing consistent and current information throughout the job life cycle.
- Tracking. As a credit professional, you need accurate job information not just at the start of a project but throughout its life cycle. Moreover, you need the relevant lien information and status updates alongside project information. Ideally, your solution needs to be:
- Automatically updated so that new statuses, requirements, and information changes are reflected in real time.
- Consistent and shared so that at every stage of the project life cycle information is available, transparent, and readily actionable.
- Integrated with your ERP so that approvals show as quickly as possible and customers can be moved forward with ease.
- Reporting. Creditors like you also need to stay informed of the broader picture of the liens you manage. For this, a tool for pulling reports across your portfolio is a boon. Ideally, reports draw from the same up-to-date information used for lien tracking, once again emphasizing consistency and minimizing the information that needs to be maintained redundantly.
An ideal solution is difficult to come by. But you can get these features, configurable to your needs, with an integrated end-to-end platform like Bectran’s. Such a platform manages project information from job sheet submission to the end of the life cycle, and integrations with leading lien management tools like Levelset, Handle and NCS keep lien filing and tracking in the same dashboard with job management.
Find out what Bectran’s integrated end-to-end solution can do for you.
Make It Easier with a Digital Workflow
Taking advantage of a digital workflow makes managing job sheets and tracking liens easier and more efficient. You can spend less time sidetracked with data entry and more time focusing on the important work where your skills matter most.
Each of the sections above included recommendations toward a digital workflow, but below provides an overview of what digitizing your job sheet process could look like.
- Collecting job sheets electronically. An electronic job sheet form makes it easier for customers to submit the information you need without ambiguity. It also ensures data collection goes smoothly and efficiently, without you having to intervene manually.
- Navigating job sheets from a consolidated dashboard. A digital solution unites all the information for credit decisions into one dashboard. Better still, updates apply in one place, making it easier to ensure data accuracy and consistency across team members and across time. Platforms with a robust set of integrations can also make project status updates automatically reflected in your ERP.
- Filing and tracking liens seamlessly. Having lien information alongside project information brings increased productivity and helps you manage risk more clearly and concisely. A digital solution with lien-filing integrations adds to that convenience the ability to track and manage liens from end-to-end, making it easier to stay on top of filing deadlines and reduce lien defaults.
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