GME Painting & Decorating Contractors

GME like most construction companies struggled to get employees to sign all the necessary paperwork.  In their case, it was to get confirmation that each employee had read the site-specific health & safety documentation before they started work on each new site.

To ensure compliance, we created their App so that for a new site you could only see 2 things – the address and the health & safety section to sign.  Once you signed the health & safety section all the other information became visible.  Such the job files that showed what and where to paint.  But also signing revealed the most important section of all – the timesheet section.  Without that, they wouldn’t get paid for that day’s work.

“Employees act daft as a brush during the week.  But they all become maths genius’s when the payslip arrives”  Clients name withheld (Not GME)

It’s funny, but only because it’s so true.  Calculating wages can be a nightmare for trades and construction businesses.

Firstly there’s the timesheet issue we’ve already described.  Then there’s how they are paid.

Some, particularly the apprentices are paid hourly.  Though this may be different on a college day.    Others can be paid different rates depending on the site and the work types their doing.

A lot of employees are on a day rate.  But this can sometimes be simpler than it looks.  Since its imperative that an Effective Rate Calculation is done to check for consistency.

Payment on price is common for painters.  But tracking accurately who has do how much of each part of a large complex job over multiple weeks is all but impossible on paper or a spreadsheet.

Finally, there’s Day Work Sheets and Variations.  Both which are typically different rates from their ‘normal’ rates of pay and need tracking and invoicing separately.

For GME and others, we can track all this in a simple App and let it do all the heavy mathematical lifting.  To get an accurate pay for each employee its as simple as entering 2 days and clicking ok.

On jobs which take place over a number of weeks or months, it’s typical for clients to want to require regular feedback on progress. GME’s Blue Chip clients typically expected a weekly report. But with sites scattered all over the country, it was time consuming and therefore expensive to collate all the required photos and note into one cohesive report. So we added a Site Photos section to the App and GME now get their employees to take relevant photos, which management then add notes to. Weekly reports now take about 5mins each.

Price work can be hard to keep a handle on.  You can get people overbooking i.e. claiming £1000 for an £800 job.  But you can also get 2 guys claiming £700 each for a £1200 job.  With old paper or SMS type timesheets, it would only be on Monday morning these issues could be identified.

To get around this issue we added a price work section to the App.  So when a job becomes ‘live’, all the price work sections are added.  Additionally in GME’s case, to see the price work you had to be allocated to that job ‘on price’.  Then when some or all of a particular section is done, the employee can go in an claim some or all of the value.  But the App will not let them claim more than to total or more than is left if its already been started.

GME’s price section is fairly simple.  But for other’s we’ve done some additional mathematical work.  So in their case, each employee puts time against a section.  When the section is marked as completed, in the next payroll run, each man is allocated a split of the money depending on the amount he has done and his hourly or day rate.