Keep the Job Moving. Get Paid Faster.
A utility construction contractor closed the gap between finished field work and billing, so crews keep moving and invoices go out sooner.
- Industry
- Construction
- Services
- Utility, power, gas distribution, water and communications
- Volume
- Hundreds of projects a week
- 80%Reduction in invoicing time
- Days to hoursTo invoice an installation
Field construction and installation work all shares a common shape. A crew completes work at a site, and that work then has to travel through several more steps, a supervisor sign off, a project management review, and eventually billing, before the company actually gets paid for it. Every one of those handoffs is a chance for delay.
When that handoff still runs on paper forms, hand drawn site sketches, and someone retyping data into a billing system back at the office, the delay adds up fast. Crews finish the physical work in a day. The company might not invoice for it, or even fully understand what happened on site, for a week or more. For any construction, utility, or field service operation running hundreds of jobs a week, that gap isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s cash sitting on the table.
Six days of paper between the crew and the invoice
A large utility construction company in the Northeast provides services to the utility, power, gas distribution, water, and communications industries. In one region alone, the company lays fiber optic cable to hundreds of private homes every week.
Before TrackVia, a single installation moved through paper forms passed between the supervisor, surveyor, foreman, and installation crew, multiple times, across many days, for every phase of the job. Surveyors hand drew the work site for the installation crew to follow. Once the installation was complete, someone handed that paper form to a project manager, who typed the information by hand into the billing system. Billing a single installation took an average of six days.
Running hundreds of projects a week this way raised real concerns about productivity and project visibility. The company wanted to digitize its manual processes and connect them to the other systems it already relied on. With a small IT team, it needed a platform that could be deployed quickly with minimal IT effort, one that individual business departments could own and maintain themselves.
Fix the field handoff first, then connect the rest
The company selected TrackVia for its mobile capabilities, flexible workflow automation, integrated reporting, and intuitive interface. It started with the workflow causing the most friction: the field survey and installation process itself.
Capture the survey in the field
Surveyors used to hand draw the work site. Now they capture site details with geo-location, photos, and notes directly in the TrackVia mobile app, including diagrams and notations for obstacles like gas lines, sidewalk crossings, or fencing. When a problem comes up, workers send an alert straight to the supervisor from the same app. Safety risks and incidents get documented the same way, giving office staff a range of safety analytics and reports to pull from whenever they need them.
Extend the same data to payroll, invoicing and project management
With field data flowing directly into the system, the company quickly extended the same approach to payroll, invoicing, and project management. Data collected during an installation became immediately available to all three teams.
“After we digitized our project survey and completion processes, we quickly extended the solution to also include safety inspections.”
Track the metrics and build a billing app
The team also built a reporting dashboard inside TrackVia to track metrics like the average number of days from the start of an installation to its invoice, the average price per install per day, and employee performance. Then it built a dedicated billing app.
TrackVia has truly changed the game on software development and deployment. We created and rolled out a mobile workflow app with limited resources in a very short period of time.
Invoices that follow the crew out of the site
- 80%Improvement in invoicing time after the dedicated billing app
- 6 days to hoursTime to invoice an installation
Invoicing time cut from six days to just hours
The dedicated billing app reduced invoicing time from six days to just hours, an 80% improvement.
No more late nights of manual data entry
Data collected during an installation became immediately available to payroll, invoicing and project management, which also gave the company better information to share with its customers.
Metrics in one dashboard
The reporting dashboard tracks days from the start of an installation to its invoice, average price per install per day, and employee performance.
Safety documented from the same app
Safety risks and incidents are logged in the field, giving office staff a range of safety analytics and reports to pull from whenever they need them.
Where other field operations can start
Start with the workflow causing the most pain
For any construction, utility, or field service operation, that’s the real pattern. Start with the workflow causing the most pain, in this case the paperwork between the field and the office, and the platform is flexible enough to keep expanding into billing, safety, and reporting without starting over each time.
Expect the work to keep changing
New jobs, new regions, and new reporting needs will keep showing up. The way a company gets work from the field to the invoice today shouldn’t have to be the way it works three years from now.
After vetting out several other solutions, TrackVia quickly seemed like a perfect solution for us… Our needs change almost weekly as regulations and the industry evolve, and we needed the flexibility to constantly tweak our platform in real time.
Projects that used to sit delayed for weeks now finish in days or even hours.
With Excel, we couldn’t see what employees were doing. With TrackVia it’s easy to track work and view what exactly has been completed. This resulted in an 80% time savings.
I wound up being able to do the same amount of work with only eight people versus 13 and that became the driving factor for them to accept TrackVia.
We are very pleased with the ease of use of the mobile application. We are thrilled to have instant visibility of the sterilization process and to be able to see immediately where issues are occurring. This enables us to focus on our number one priority, which is our patients and their loved ones.
TrackVia has truly changed the game on software development and deployment. We created and rolled out a mobile workflow app with limited resources in a very short period of time.
Their solution provided the flexibility we needed to meet unique project requirements while affording visibility and control.
TrackVia has improved the accuracy of our data. In the past it was a chore for our coordinators to document issues in real time. Now, they can just open the mobile app or website, check a few boxes and they are done.
The first application I built—it was simple—I think it took 10 minutes.
Become a success story
Increased productivity
Do more work with the same people.
Reduced cost
Less manual work, rework, duplicate entry, and administrative overhead.
Reduced risk
Better compliance, evidence, accountability, and auditability.
Improved performance
Faster cycle times, fewer delays, earlier intervention, and higher service levels.
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See how we fit your operation
A working session on the workflows your crews actually run.