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Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

It’s the kind of business story we love: a startup service company with a niche market in the oil and gas industry expands its operations as it gains more experience, employs the right people, builds positive networks, and utilizes today’s technology.

Often, though, as bids are made and new projects started, a certain amount of disparity can occur between the company objective and the mission to keep the current workflow moving smoothly. What’s needed is an intervention of sorts, where a software platform can take on the duties of maintaining transparency, the accurate transfer of documents, and change order management for service business.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

When your construction company was new, you invested in an entry-level accounting package, assuming that future updates would keep up with the ongoing needs of your company.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Now that you have a project scheduled, you need to get your resources lined up, plan the personnel you’ll assign to the project, and start fleshing out timelines.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Construction deals with buildings like houses and offices, whereas heavy construction deals with roads, infrastructure, tunnels, utility sites, etc. With such diverse, frequently city-wide projects, it’s easy to see why the demands for heavy construction management exceed those of lower-key construction projects.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

HVAC companies face the unique challenge of managing construction projects while also juggling a service organization. While overwhelming at times, especially in an industry where the margin of error is slim to none, there are several things that HVAC companies can do to prepare to organize and deal with requests for information (RFIs).

In addition to securing and organizing contracts, the success of heavy construction businesses relies on a continuous flow of meaningful data to monitor the financial and operational efficiency of multiple projects. Ideally, the right software tracks expenses and determines the profitability of projects.

As a growing HVAC contractor, you juggle many programs and applications to handle a wide variety of business functions – accounting, hiring, tracking inventory, and the like. You also try to control costs, but with the increase in business it’s getting more difficult to monitor multiple projects. Updates on financials come to you without the benefit of real-time data. Consequently, some projects are on hold until inventory arrives, change orders are updated, etc.

You just spent a lot of time and energy on a recent – complicated – HVAC installation at a building site that you were hoping would open up a lot of future business in the Alberta area.

As noted on the Natural Resources Canada website, there are “...over 825,000 kilometers of transmission, gathering, and distribution lines in Canada, [and with] most provinces having significant pipeline infrastructure, a huge portion are federally regulated.”

Construction projects and change orders are an inevitable duo. No matter how far along in the project you are, and no matter how big or small the change order is, any change can impede the project’s duration and will add expenses.