9 Ways Bolt Improves a Trade Contractor's Life

Moving away from using paper and whiteboards for project management and scheduling is an important step for trade contractors. Using these out-of-date tools isn’t just inefficient and tedious; it also costs a lot of time. Going digital and utilizing a mobile app can improve your business—and your life!

Here are nine ways Bolt gives you time back in your day and adds money to each job you do:

Speed up builder purchase order approvals

You work with many builders and receive purchase orders in various ways. You likely must log into multiple builder portals to view purchase orders or sort through your email inbox to find the latest one. Sometimes, the builder forgets to send you a purchase order, and they call or text you instead, asking you to schedule work without a PO.

Bolt can collect and auto-populate the builder's PO into one screen, simplifying the process. You just review the PO, make sure it's accurate, and accept it with a click of a button. No more manually entering the information, saving you time and reducing errors.

Schedule jobs directly from your tablet or phone

Scheduling is never accurate and typically is a nightmare. You may not know the schedule for tomorrow until 3 p.m. today. Keeping your schedule in one centralized place, like a whiteboard, or Outlook Calendar, makes the constant rescheduling unmanageable.

By putting the schedule into Bolt, it distributes it to many different views and users. This means you can manage your schedule on a tablet or phone, so you’re not chained to your whiteboard in the office. This capability also allows you to spread out the responsibility of keeping an accurate schedule.

For example, if a supervisor in the field sees that the job isn't ready, they can snap a picture, reschedule the work order, and track the reason why they are rescheduling. Any type of “he said, she said” argument can easily be quieted because you have a picture, and proof for why you changed the schedule. Many of our users report that they can go have dinner with their family and adjust tomorrow’s schedule at a more convenient time, instead of being forced to go back to the office to update the schedule.

Job-ready confirmations keep your team onsite only when it matters

The builder said the job site was ready, but you get there and find it out it wasn’t. Another wasted trip. Instead of spending 30 minutes to an hour each day calling and texting the builder to confirm that it’s ready, with Bolt, you just send the builder an auto-confirmation where they can confirm or request to reschedule the work order.

Since Bolt strives to bring transparency and simplicity to your communication with your builder, you will be able to see if they read the notification or ignored it. Using the auto-confirmation feature saves you time and money by avoiding dry runs, helps develop trust between you and the builder, and increases your reputation with your builders by bringing professionalism to your scheduling.

Track EPOs to prove and get paid for your extra work

On every job, there is a give and take between trades and builders. Sometimes, the builder just simply needs a favor, and some extra work done even though there isn't budget left on the job. Usually, there are also small extras that could be invoiced by the trade, if only they were tracked. Bolt gives you a way to keep track of what work you did for free and track the extras you need to invoice. You may still “choose” to give away extra work, but you can now document these times, understanding how much you’re giving away and what you’re collecting.

So next time you have a pricing meeting with a builder, you can bring your rescheduling and contract data and show the extra work you’ve been doing for free. Tracking these extra POs in Bolt can often add $100 —$200 of revenue to each job. Depending on the volume of work, this can result in tens of thousands of dollars added to your bottom line every year.

Access your data anytime, no connection required

Cell coverage can be spotty on a job site. Bolt lets you record everything in the system, even when you’re offline. Once you’re connected, it automatically pushes the information to the rest of the system.

See for yourself 

Having the ability to take pictures and store them with the job helps you avoid the “he-said, she-said" conversations that haunt the industry. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and now you can show the builder whether the site is ready, as well as documenting the work you’ve done, or the work done by another trade on the job.

Productivity and profit insights

Having real-time information about what’s going on in your business means you can run it more efficiently. Bolt lets you customize the key business metrics you want to see and drill down to get deeper insight into your business. Now you can view per-job profit and loss, employee productivity, identify wasted trips, and problem areas to help manage your business more efficiently.

Stay on top of rescheduling trends and causes

With Bolt, you can enter a reason why the job needed to be rescheduled and attach a photo to it. By keeping track of changes and why they needed to be made, you can reduce the back-and-forth that usually occurs and prevent dry runs.

Reasons for your punch list

When builders send punch lists to the trades, they may leave out items (sometimes intentionally) that they would have to pay extra for. For example, the builder and homeowner decided to add an extra electrical outlet but didn’t include it in the final floor plans used for the installation. With Bolt, the trades can bring up the plans against the punch list and show that it was outside the scope of work. You can then create an extra PO for this extra work and charge the builder.

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