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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
Curious what an end-to-end integrated solution looks like? Learn more.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Want to start using a platform that consolidates the job sheet workflow and offers industry-leading efficiency tools?