Service to Cash Cycle: How to Streamline Processes and Improve Cash Flow

Especially during challenging financial times, it can be easy for bottlenecks to disrupt your field service business’s cash flow. This puts additional stress on you, your business, and your employees. So how can you improve your company’s cash flow? By streamlining internal field service processes with field service software. Take a closer look here at how field service software can help you improve your service to cash cycle. 

Streamlining Internal and Client Documentation

The first step towards successful project completion is often getting your client onboarded. If this brings stacks of paperwork to your business, you might need to streamline your documentation process. Thankfully, field service software can help.

Field service software generates documents using configurable templates. You can make custom templates for your Quotes, Proposals, Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), Work Orders, Invoices, and so much more. Once your documentation has been created, it is also easy to complete, share, save, file, and retrieve.

End-to-End Documentation Improvement For Service to Cash Flow

Field service software streamlines every facet of the documentation process: 

• Creating New Documents: Field service software lets you create custom templates, which can then be used over and over again to generate documents instantly. Additional features, such as invoice calculations, make customizing these forms both quick and accurate for each new customer and job. 
• Filling Out Your Forms: Completing your paperwork has never been easier than it is with digital documents. You can type in information or use your device’s talk-to-text feature for a time-saving advantage. Typed documents are easier to read, eliminating miscommunications and interpretation times. You can also integrate images with ease. 
• Adding a Signature: Signing documents formerly required you to print, sign, scan, and upload your form. Not only does this take an extended amount of time, but it also wastes money and paper. With mobile documents, you can add a signature in seconds by using the touch screen of your smartphone. Your field technician can also collect a client signature at the end of the job, eliminating invoicing errors.
• Sharing Digital Documents: Rather than requiring you to fax, scan, upload, mail, or deliver completed paperwork, digital documents can be shared instantly through the cloud. 
• Save, File, and Retrieve: Do you have to navigate complex networks of paperwork when it is time to store, file, and retrieve documents? Instead, digital files are effortless to organize and can be retrieved using keywords. Not only does this take up less time and office space, but it also makes it nearly impossible to lose or damage documents.

Avoiding Work (and Cash Flow) Delays

One of the most common roadblocks for your cash flow is often delays in your work. Naturally, a client is often unwilling to pay until they see that a job has been completed. To improve your company’s cash flow, you may need to start by streamlining processes to prevent these delays.  

• Streamline Equipment Maintenance Processes: Without the right maintenance, your equipment could experience costly failures that halt your work. Predictive and preventive maintenance technology monitors your machinery and sends you an alert when you are due for service. This can keep your equipment (and your cash flow) running smoothly.
• Improve Scheduling and Dispatch Processes: Delays often occur when you do not have the right personnel on the job site with the information and equipment they need to get the job done. Field service software streamlines this scheduling process from start to finish. Read more here about streamlining your scheduling and dispatching process.
• Automated System Monitoring: Keeping tabs on other disruptions in your business can require constant monitoring. Thankfully, field service software is built to do just that. Using IoT technology, this software continuously collects and interprets field service. You can access up-to-date insights without having to constantly monitor every facet of your business. This information is then organized into data analytics and reporting dashboards, making them accessible and actionable.

Instant and Effective Communication Processes

Work visibility and communication are the lifelines of your business. You can streamline internal communication and improve your cash flow by making information transparent. Field service software makes information easily accessible to your employees. For example, dispatch email includes both scheduling and ticket information, offering all of the insights your employees need in one place. Your personnel also get email notifications sent straight to their smartphones, ensuring that no essential details are ever missed. 

Perhaps most importantly, how can you improve and streamline customer communication? With field service software, all of the documentation and information they need is uploaded into customer self-service dashboards. These custom platforms make communicating essential information easy. Best of all, clients can access these details anytime and anywhere. 

Improve Field Service Cash Flow with FieldEquip

With the right processes in place, you should begin to unlock the fullest capacity of your company’s cash flow. For a field service software that does all of this and more, FieldEquip is here for you. You can schedule a free demo or contact our experts to learn more today.