The Connected Construction Professional Series: Finance & Accounting Roles

If you’re a finance professional like a CFO or comptroller, you might be charged with ensuring your company’s books stay out of the red, that cash flow is solvent. Even more, you might be the “person with the checkbook,” responsible for making smart purchases of capital assets, business solutions, vendors, partners and more. You likely rely on your team of accounting professionals to feed you with accurate, timely data, culled from literally dozens of sources—from projects to organizational departments to outside interests.

That’s why as an accounting professional, the pressure is often on you. And your job ain’t easy. Sometimes, the accounting “team” may be just one person. Sometimes dozens. Either way, you likely have data flying at you from all angles. You may be responsible for simply keeping tracks of the general ledger and cash flow. You might be responsible for making sense of your projects’ job costs or work in progress reports. You might be in charge of purchasing, accounts payable or receivable, or billing. You might even do it all—with a steady helping of payroll thrown in every week for good measure.

What you number-crunchers have shared with us, time and time again, is that there are five key elements that really help your work: speed, accuracy, consistency, ease of use, and trust.

This means operating in a truly connected construction environment where:

• You and your teams are working with real-time (or near real-time) data
• The right people can access the data they need any time, anywhere
• Everyone is working from the same set of standardized data
• That data is up-to-date, accurate and trustworthy
• Working in software is easy, and process automation makes collaboration with other people in the organization or project stakeholders even easier
• There is peace of mind knowing the important data is protected, and managed by a trusted vendor

Unfortunately, many contractors today don’t have the right tools in place to realize a connected construction experience. Siloed teams, disconnected software programs with wildly different data sets, cumbersome in-house IT management for things like server maintenance, software updates, and backups; and even manual processes like pen and paper all bog the construction process down. And, it’s largely you number crunchers that end up paying the biggest price: wasting hours trying to reconcile data, build reports with incomplete data, tracking down and correcting mistakes … and often working late.

You have already heard of “the cloud” by this point, and might recognize the benefits of the real-time data and workflows. But, as an accounting or finance professional, you know better than anyone else that just making a move for the sake of making a move isn’t the most cost-effective approach.

Instead, moving to the cloud should be a transformation. With a suite of connected solutions like Trimble Construction One, real-time data and collaboration, coupled with workflow automation and powerful new tools like analytics and dashboards, you can still be your organization’s workhorse, with maybe one-fifth of the effort you’re probably putting in right now.

Trimble Construction One is a connected, cloud-based construction management platform that drives productivity, efficiency and accuracy at each phase of the construction project lifecycle. Leveraging cloud data and workflows, it ties together all facets of construction—from estimating and bidding, to project setup and project management, to accounting and workforce management, to field and service management, to project closeout and delivery—in collaborative working environments with a single set of shared data.

Using data from all phases of construction, Trimble Construction One connects teams with real-time information that shows true project costs and resource allocation so they get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.