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yes this is so much fun you know i've just nothing makes me happier than spreadsheets and sharepoint and numbers and files and the discussion we're having here it's fantastic i'm mark olson luke gibson and i have a combined 50 years in construction as fence contractors in that time we've both experienced failures and success we travel the country talking with other contractors who share their experiences in hopes that their stories can make you a more successful contractor as we start 2021 one of the things that i thought i would talk about a little bit is going paperless now our company went paperless back in 2014 when we started over after olson fencing but i know that a lot of people are still filling filing cabinets full of papers and are very frustrated when they can't find the stuff that they need or they've got to spend a bunch of time filing stuff and even after it's all filed it's still a struggle to go back and try and find files as you need them think about receipts invoices things like that you're like oh where did we get that product so on today's episode of the successful contractor we're going to talk about how you can go paperless and some of the programs we use at our company swi to help us go paperless so that we can manage all of our paperwork and make it very easy to access no matter where we are if you find this content at all helpful or useful please consider subscribing and if you subscribe don't forget to hit the notification bell so that you'll receive notifications every time we upload a new video we try and get those out about every friday bringing you some of the best content on the internet as far as contractor success is concerned and as always we love to see the comments and hear what you guys have to say provide us with feedback give us ideas things that you guys want some help on any of those comments and suggestions down below are greatly appreciated and if you like what you're seeing don't forget to hit the like button with all that said let's move into what we're talking about today and that's going paperless the irs has said that we need to keep records and we have records requirements to keep records for up to seven years it just kind of depends on what it is but that can amount to boxes and boxes full of paperwork that you're storing you're tripping over and stuff that when you really need to go back and access that is not that easy to find what you're looking for depending on how good your filing system is corners of desks and everything can get piled up and what we at our company have done is use we've used several programs to help us manage all that paperwork and turn it into digital digital copies that are then much easier to organize online where we don't have to have that paper mess in our office or pay to store it and then pay to destroy it after seven years whatever that may be so i'd like to walk you through some of the programs we use and how those work in our company so you can see which ones are applicable to you two of the things that we need to go paperless is we need to get as much of that paper from the field from our field guys as we can in digital format and so we've used a couple different programs to do that the first one i'll mention is an expense tracker that allows our crews to using an app input all of their expenses they're either they're all assigned to debit card and so they're out there spending money on a weekly basis because we travel all over the state and so they need to make purchases for concrete or job supplies or whatever else fuel hotels things like that and the apps let them take a picture of that information input all the information that's relative or pertains to our office that our office staff needs to see to be able to input that into our accounting such as job codes we have job numbers that we can expense track per job which is very important if you want a job cost then we have things like account codes account costing codes so things like fuel go under one cost code hotels go on another cost code supplies go under one materials go into one so and we try and limit that a little bit so that people don't have just a 100 items that they've got to select from the simpler we keep that we find that the easier it is to get the right information out of the field so we're using an expense tracker app we're playing around with a couple different ones we're using another one that i won't mention right now that worked really well but they did some things that really irritated us here recently so we want to find something that more aligns with our value system so there's plenty out there i think i could mention a couple of maybe tally and um certifies another one so there's several different of those out there and i would encourage you to research on your own which one of those may work for your business to get the receipts from the field and into your office digitally to begin with so that's the number one so i'll show you a little bit about certify on the computer and how we interact with that on both sides for both the office side and the input side on my end from my phone the second one that we use and we found a couple years ago is called raken r-a-k-e-n and we'll provide links to some of this stuff down below so feel free to check out those links but what raken is is a field reporting software and that's tailored to the construction industry for us that's been really beneficial because we've got crews all over the state not just in one specific location so i'm not at every job and the guys are oftentimes away from any one of our main offices you know several hours and not coming home every night to bring us reports so it's a way for us to get all that information from the field along with pictures of the project different challenges they may have run into they've got areas in that reporting system that they can put the challenges for the day it automatically uploads the weather for three times during the day so that we can see what the weather conditions were if they say well we just couldn't get anything done it rained all day that'll show up on the field report and then we can set us a custom list of questions down at the bottom but one of the other really neat key features is that it allows us to track all the time uh for all of that crew that was on that project right there on the ticket so in our company we have the foreman or the crew leaders uh all do all the time for the entire crew because they were the ones that were there when you're leaving from a hotel and stuff like that in the morning we can't track that time it's it's not for we don't have a time clock or anything we tried to use some apps like tee sheets and found that that was just a complete mess for us we had people clocking into the wrong job so we get wrong wrong costing on jobs they would forget to clock in they would forget to clock out it was just a mess and so we've gone to basically the forum and tracking all that time on these ranking tickets and then that way when payroll needs that information it's already submitted to them on a nightly basis the other cool thing is that as you'll see on the raken ticket we get all those it'll total up all the jobs the hours for that particular job so if we're working on a project for several months which sometimes we do we might go back work on a little bit at a time just based on what our general contractors asked us to do it'll keep a total of what the total job hours we've spent on that projector so we don't have to go to another spot in our accounting program to figure that out we can quickly take a snapshot and see how we're doing on our actual hours versus our budgeted hours for the project which is pretty big to us so that's the second one we use the third thing we do is obviously we're still going to get a lot of mails not everybody's savvy on sending electronic statements and stuff like that and that's not a big deal what we've done is we've gone to a scan snap scanner and each one of our stations for anybody that has one i think we probably in our office have eight of them basically anybody that's dealing with any paper has one and they can scan those documents right into the computer and then send them electronically to whoever needs those documents or save them in a file so we'll show you those scan snap scanners and they've come out with a new one that's even a little bit better than the ones we have and we'll show you how those work and how fast and efficient those can be in processing your paper and getting that digitized other secrets you might not know if you've got an iphone is that you can scan documents right through your notes app so look into that if you pull up your notes it'll give you an option to scan there's also things an app called jot not pro that allow you to scan sheets but you can scan basically using your phone instead of taking a picture it basically creates a pdf and a lot of times i prefer pdfs because picture files end up being a lot larger and harder to harder to flip through the pdfs just work better with a filing system for most offices if we can't get pdfs then obviously the photographs are just fine so we'll walk you through a little bit of that on the show you how we inter interact with those different programs on the computer here and this is it with raken you can obviously get into the website and view all of your rake and tickets through the raken portal but the other thing it will do is interface with google drive which we uh like to do and the reason that we like to have it all upload everything to google drive is that just gives us a backup of all that information plus i can give access in that folder to several different people that have google accounts without having to give them access into our raken portal so as you can see it's going to organize these files by date modified so any file that was added is going to show up on top just because that's why i've got it organized but it can be alphabetical or however you choose to do that yesterday we had a project where crew was working on some gate operators and we can come in here and quickly look at those reports which are organized by day so it goes year then it goes month and then it goes to the day so we can have we can have field report for every day that we are working and those are organized chronologically so the crews like this because rather than either having to hand write all this stuff down or having to manually type it all in the other thing they can do on their phones is they can use speech to text so it really speeds up the reporting process and is encourages them because it's easier the barriers are a little lower it encourages them to do this and get us more good information so you can see right here at the top we have a description what happened who was on the project we can see the hours that everybody had and you can set all the payroll hours and all this stuff up however you choose but you can see who the crew leader was who was on the project how long they were on the project the description of all the work you have a place where you can put materials equipment any other things that may be pertinent to you in the notes general notes they're talking about a gate that got hit that we need to build a new gate panel for so they've given us all those measurements when we go back and review all this and this makes it really easy let's say i put in a gate operator and two years go by and i don't know i can't remember what i put in a lot of times when we've got all those photos we ask our crews to take photos we can go back and review all those photos and look and see what hardware is installed and what the wiring is like maybe we can help somebody troubleshoot on the on the phone if they're having a problem trying to figure out the wiring inside the operator then down at the bottom here we have custom questions that we can ask our crew so some of the questions we're looking for is the project done were there any accidents do you need an invoice for the customer different things like that and the reason we asked why we need an invoice for the customer is on the day that they're going to be if they know they're going to finish up tomorrow they're supposed to take a invoice with them and collect payment from the customer at that time on residential stuff so um uh per diem because we travel is per diem applicable to this project and you can set all these questions up specific to your company so you can see down here they've taken a whole bunch of photos of the different type of hardware that's installed and some of the problems that were experienced on the gate it looks like there was a pad they think they were talking about a pad that shifted so all those notes go in here so the next crew that goes down there knows everything that happened at this gate and what's been done and what's left to be done these photos here as we look at all these photos when you click on these it does not let you just scroll through them it's going to pull up one photo at a time and it's kind of slow to load so this is where looking at this project a little bit differently we can go into that other folder if we go back let's go back right here daily reports let's go back one more we have a raken gallery and that's where we can go in and see all the pictures and this is also going to be organized by dave so here's all the pictures that were part of that report and the nice thing about looking at it this way is now i can just quickly scroll through from one photo to the next and look for all the all the pertinent information so that helps me in the office who's never going to go to the job site check the quality of the workmanship look for any problems that may exist all those type of different things because i'm getting all that information from the crew every night regardless of whether or not they come back to the office so that's what we use that's raking kind of in a nutshell i think if you remember at the top it was showing some weather it's right here we can see the weather it's 15 degrees at 6 00 a.m it was 32 at noon and then uh 35 degrees at 4 pm so if somebody you know the reason they've done this is because crews may say you know it was just too rainy i couldn't get anything done and you can go back and look at the weather report and say oh they just didn't try that hard you know i didn't see any rain in the forecast and for us that's you know it never been an issue and the reason that's not an issue is because the time i feel like i can't trust somebody that probably means they don't need to be in our company i really don't believe in over spying on people that means that there's a trust issue there and we need to be able to trust our team so i will say that about but i know that there's a lot of employers out there that have a serious level of distrust with their people and this is just another accountability factor and that's why rakens added that to this this program so we'll talk about microsoft now what we use to organize all of our seats basically our digital filing cabinet if you will is called sharepoint sharepoint is a part of the microsoft office 365. microsoft office 365 gives you access to several different apps a lot of which i don't use every day but some of the big ones are going to be word excel powerpoint and then sharepoint is is the most used app that we use between that and excel in our office so what it allows us to do is create sharepoint sites and we can from sharepoint create folders within sharepoint or different sharepoint sites that give different access to different people so if you have really confidential information such as employment information where you've got to keep that password protected and keep that away from people that don't need that information you can create either separate folders or separate separate sharepoint sites where all that stuff is housed that the general public in your office doesn't have access to so sharepoint we have two different sides of our sharepoint we have one called the sharepoint intranet and that's just a kind of an intercompany where most files are available to everybody and then we have the confidential side where we keep employee records and things like that that very very few limited people have access to only the people that need that such as payroll department and ownership but the cool thing for us is the way we've got our folder shared our folders organized and i'll show you a little bit about how we did that so every year we create a new folder for that year so we have folders called 2021 now and within those folders we have three separate files that are super critical to us one for receipts one for payroll and one for customers and then we have quick links over here on the left hand side so we can quickly access two of those payroll is not something that everybody has access to so that information is kept confidential in its own separate folder but the one the two that we use the most is receipts which is going to be where all of our receipts for the debit card purchases and things like that that we do along with invoices from suppliers and things of that nature so we just came up with an organizational system that worked for us and that made sense to us and that's going to be very company specific you can see they got i just flipped between two different views there i like this view a little bit better and this is organized alphabetically and you can organize it however you like but you can see we've created one for access controls and that's where all of our gate operator parts and things like that any supplies that and vendors that are associated with our gate automation are going to go in that folder concrete quarry concretes and quarries go in here so for buying any rock or concrete all the concrete vendors go into that folder credit card purchases go into that folder disposal and sanitation for our landfill fees and stuff so we just came up with the system that works for us and then sometimes within that we'll create different months such as fuel is one of those where we have bulk fuel tanks in our yards plus we have fuel receipts every month and so since we're only in january we just have a january folder but every month we'll create a new folder for all of those receipts now the thing you'll see and we'll talk about this when we get to scan snap is is that inside those folders everything's dated so it starts with the year the four digit year then underscore then the two digit month and then the two-digit day and then we see a this is purchased at sinclair so everything's organized like that so that we can if we know maybe we don't remember exactly when we bought something we can organize we can look through it very very quickly by day i can just remember that i bought some stuff in june i can go through and try and find those that receipt from that particular time it makes finding that stuff really easy when i need to reference it and we find ourselves doing this all the time the nice thing too about having it online is that when i need to access this stuff and i'm on the road i'm not in my office i still have access to everything whereas if it was in file cabinet i have zero access i've got to call somebody hope they're at the office hope they can understand what i'm talking about know where to find it and those things take time that's how we use office 365 because we needed the other programs and this just came with it and we decided we were going to learn how to use it and it works very well for what we're using it for to keep our files securely and allow access now the minute somebody doesn't work for our company anymore we can automatically revoke any ownership of any folder we just delete them as a user and they can't access anything anywhere so it gives us that security that we know we've secured all of our files from outside viewership um you can see also in these who has uploaded the file so if that's important to you you want to know who did something or how that was how that was handled you can see track that file to find out who's been making modifications other cool things about microsoft office 365 if you didn't know is that multiple people can be in a spreadsheet making edits to a spreadsheet and it'll allow you to do that and then sync all that stuff together if you do it in the online version whereas if everybody's got spreadsheets on their different desktops that's not going to be synced and then somebody could override somebody else's work we have a couple spreadsheets that we're all working on and because it's on the microsoft office 365 it won't let us do anything that's going to impair anybody else's work so it kind of syncs all that stuff together so what i'll do now is i'll have to take you to another i'll have to take you to my home office where i do most of my work and show you kind of how our scan snap works and how we get all those paper files converted digitally quickly and how that workflow works and i'll show you all that if you'll follow me upstairs so what i'd like to show you first is certified now i don't know if this is going to be the right program for you i'm not sure that this is the right program for us but we've been using an exp an expense tracker for quite a while and this is something that's key to being able to succeed at this right here you can find out and you can import all these items straight from your quickbooks software so we use account codes so based on what the number it starts with depends on whether or not it's overhead direct costs things of that nature so a 600 account or one of the one that starts with the six is a direct expense job-related expense so most of our team members that are out there in the field that are filling out these reports are using the 600 they know that if they're on a job then it needs to start with a six so we've kept the system very simple and then when all these reports come through and the office is inputting these expenses into our quickbooks they don't have to think as hard about what's going on so they have to select one of these categories we can put the amount from their seat and i uploaded this receipt here just a little bit ago um it tells uh tells the office how they paid for that because we've got accounts we've got debit cards a couple people have credit cards for some of the larger purposes and things like that so um if it's a truck if they say anything to do with the truck it's automatically going to ask them for mileage so if it's fuel they're going to ask it's going to prompt them for mileage and that's very convenient if you're tracking how far people are driving so it's just another check and a balance to make sure everything's being done right it'll ask them for a unit number along with their mileage and then here is the part that if you're going to do job costing you've got to know what job that's going to so it's not like we don't every single receipt that comes in if it's got one of these 60 000 account codes needs to be coded to a job and we have to know what project we're working on um they have to fill that out we create job numbers for every single job and so they are given a list of all their job numbers every job they're on they know what that job number is and then they they input this they put the vendor in and the nice thing about all this is that not only do i have all this information saved in sharepoint microsoft sharepoint but i've got it saved here as well so if i ever need to go back and search here i can search for a vendor and certify or whatever program you're using usually they're all stored here and you can go back and search for all that uh location so where they were at when they purchased it and then if it's a reimbursable expense if you have people that are using maybe maybe they had to buy something and they didn't have the funds or something happened or they bought it on their day off and i don't know things come up and sometimes they have to buy things on their own so they tell them that hey i need to be reimbursed for this and they can flag that then we have a box here if we're doing t m stuff we can check that as billable so this is a little bit about certify just one program there's many out there i ex i would hope that you guys would research that a little bit choose one that's going to work good for your operation but this is a little bit about how ours is set up they can then add this report add this receipt to a report and then send that on to the office and then the office basically approves that report grabs all the information off there and then stores these files on our sharepoint site now i forgot we need some paper what do we got down here oh yeah hey look paper oh we just got our mail you know what came in today guess what came in the mail today i'm not gonna say it but all this stuff came in the mouth so we're gonna run this through our handy dandy scanner and there we go flip that thing up like that and the nice thing about these scanners is they will accept different widths different thicknesses i can scan driver's licenses through here if i can put it in that automatic document feeder tray it'll scan it sometimes it runs into problems then it brings up this window here so you can scan it if you've got dropbox we do share we do save some things to dropbox it's nice if i'm trying to so i have a desk right next to my wife's this is actually my wife's workstation and she'll scan it to dropbox because i don't have a scanner and then it automatically shows up in my dropbox and i can manipulate it on my desktop without her having to email it and waste all that so we do use scan to dropbox periodically but primarily what we're using is the scan snap organizer so open it up and you can see it'll save several days worth of stuff here and you can go through and clean these files up to save hard drive space but here's our most recent file i don't even know what we're contractor registration renewal form so if the paper's been folded it will send some of these folds and stuff like that and think that that's a line so sometimes we want to go in here and clean some of that stuff up we can select multiple uh it looks like that's the only one but if i wanted to select multiple i can just hit control here and select as many as i want or shift if i want to do so let me skip over it's just like everything else it's basically set up microsoft style i can delete that page out of here or that sets if we had a document that was many pages long and i had a bunch of blank pages in there but if you're using like you're just going to go in and scan your entire mail stack which we do all the time then i probably wouldn't even do that because in a case like that what we do is we'll grab one piece of mail let's say this is one piece of mail we'll drag it to our desktop so drag it to my desktop there's my piece of mail and you'll see this is why we have our naming that's why we name our files like we do date now the year the month then the day and then if we want to put a lot of times we'll change this last so i'll go in here and close anyhow so if this was an invoice from a vendor what i would do is i'd come in here and keep the date back this up and then put in an invoice number so i can add their custom invoice number maybe i don't have an invoice number because it's something i ordered off amazon i'll put a description that i ordered scan snap scanner off amazon and put that in there just anything that's going to help me find that later on because chances are you may need to come back and review that so that's how we name our files and that's why we name them that way and then they're all chronologically inside of our sharepoint file they'll be by date so we can do that for multiple multiple different files we can grab one sheet we can grab five sheets and just create one file out of them and that's how we process all of our mail statements same thing we'll scan all the statements at the first of the month and then pull them into microsoft sharepoint and file them where they need to be filed we can rotate documents real easily if it shows up upside down or we the scanner is pretty smart and a lot of times it'll auto rotate those but sometimes it'll mess up it can't quite read it and we can quickly rotate those documents to wherever we need and then before we drag them to the desktop it'll do business card scanning so if you're a person that you really like to collect business cards it'll scan a stack of business cards and then kind of organize those for you as well but the one we have here is called the scan snap uh ix 500 and now they came out with the ix 1500 this is actually discontinued and the 1500 has a little bit better automatic document feeder and they've dropped the price by about 100 so those are available on amazon best place to buy them and once you buy one of these you're going to want multiple everybody that processes paper is going to want one at their destination that's the only way we found to really get everybody to buy into it is for everybody have their own it's not very convenient to bring all the papers up and then have them email it to somebody especially when you have multiple locations and different parts of the building it's just trying to pick up people's efficiency so they don't have to work leave their workstation to do the work that they need to that's where we we find value in these not to mention the fact that we can go back and review all those documents later on find them all very easily and we don't have stacks and stacks of paper everywhere i don't have one single filing cabinet in this office not one so that's how scan snap helps us go paperless and hopefully it can help you too we'll uh we'll drop a link in the description down below so that you can see what scan snap we recommend and would highly suggest that you pick one of those up it's almost impossible to go paperless without a way to get those files digitized so this is serious business this is serious paperwork's serious you know this is one of the videos that i didn't want to make because it's just super serious and i'm not really about being all serious sometimes i like that so i'm sorry that if this is a little bit too serious but hopefully you got a little bit of good information about it in the next video we're gonna smile a lot more and until then you have a great day you