Vent: found out my crew was logging job hours in three different apps and I never checked
I was going over a bid for a 4 bedroom house in Plano that should have taken us 6 weeks and somehow came in 11 days over, and nothing added up. Turns out my foreman was writing hours on a paper pad in his truck, the office guy was typing them into a spreadsheet, and one of the new hires was putting his in the app we pay for, so I literally had three versions of the same day. I sat in the truck for an hour that Friday just staring at the numbers and realized I had been pricing jobs off bad info for close to 5 months. We run one system now, everyone logs by 4pm or I hear about it. Anybody else catch something like this way later than they should have?
Man, five months of bad numbers is brutal, I feel that in my bones. Here's what I want to know though, when you finally sat down with all three sets of hours, which version was actually closest to the truth? Because in my experience the paper pad in the truck is usually the honest one, guys write down what they actually worked, and the app is where stuff gets fudged or forgotten at the end of a long day. Also, how far off were the bids? Like were you losing money on every job or just squeaking by and wondering why the margin felt thin? And the big one, did you have to go back to any of those customers and eat the difference, or did you just swallow it and move on? I'm asking because I've got a guy who still texts me his hours at 9pm and I keep letting it slide.