First and foremost you need to centralize and connect your project finances. But hold on, before you start copying everything into one spreadsheet, start simple. List out the different items that you’re tracking on your development projects and identify which items take the most time. You’ll probably find that much of your time is spent waiting for colleagues to send you documents, asking for clarification, or manually delivering documents to someone and waiting for approval. You might even realize that you lose the most time when, after hours of work, you notice the general contractor sent you an incorrect document and you need to start over…at 5:30pm…on Friday.
Picture a world where you don’t have to manually prepare draw packages, development managers have all project information in one place, and data is incredibly organized. Centralizing your information is the key to making that dream a reality. So how exactly do you do that? The first step is moving your project finances from siloed spreadsheets and emails to a cloud-based solution. Implementing cloud-based software empowers your team to organize all information in one place and access it from anywhere. The most up-to-date budgets, invoices, lien waivers, pay apps, approvals, project communication and more, should all be easily accessible by your team. The key here is that you are digitizing and connecting all of the information. You aren’t just dumping a bunch of files in a cloud storage service and calling it centralized. You are equipping your development team with a completely digital process for handling their workflow, no emails, printing or company drives required. This ensures that you only have to add information once and it becomes immediately accessible wherever it is needed without ever having to reference a document. Ultimately, this connected information allows you to stay ahead of cost overruns and prevent major issues before they occur.
