Time is money! Continuing our series of profit-focused webinars, Senior Product Specialist Ian Schaefer and Sales Specialist Jordan Davis show you how to plan for profits by utilizing powerful features in ConstructionSuite's OnPlan Scheduling. If you missed our live session, you can find the recording here, as well as questions asked in the webinar by some of ConstructionSuite's 500,000 users:
In the video, you can see how implementing OnPlan Scheduling can take your team's project management to the next level. Syncing with the estimate, cash flow reporting, and setting reminders are just a few of the features that ConstructionSuite helps you control to increase profit and minimize cost on the job. Throughout this webinar, participants submitted questions for our team to answer - here are a few great questions that came in:
Is there a way to take the dollar values out of the schedule so we may display it onsite?
Ian: There's a couple ways, actually. One of those involves a special procedure for saving, but more importantly for me since cash flow is going to be important later, rather than wiping those values out, I'm going to go to View, Show/Hide Columns, and scroll down to turn off the total estimated value on the Gantt chart for that nobody sees it. This is especially useful if you're printing out schedules to hang on a jobsite.
How is creating a schedule from an estimate different than creating a schedule from a template?
Ian: That's a great question! There's two primary options for generating these schedules. You can generate a schedule from a template and from the template you're going to have all the tasks that you would typically need and generally you're going to have everything inter-connected. Creating it from the estimate doesn't provide those predecessor relationships but it does give you a lot of that pricing information and the resources. So your trade-off is, in essence, one has all of your predecessors, the other loads all of the dollar amounts and resources.
When assigning resources to tasks, is there a way to see if that person or company is available?
Ian: When selecting a resource, the pop-up shows in the bottom corner the dates that the selected resource is available. The days in red are the days that the resource is not available, and if you click on that date, you can see the tasks they are currently assigned to and the project the task is associated with.