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Business growth and increased market share are important to strive for, but if your growth isn't organized, you'll end up investing unnecessary time, money, and manpower to go, essentially, nowhere.

You can prevent this, however, by implementing Sage 300 management and business accounting software.

These are the value-added benefits of implementing Sage 300:

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.

Contractors operating in multiple counties and/or jurisdictions in Alberta encounter more requirements for doing business than their counterparts working in only one county/jurisdiction. This is especially true when it comes to figuring payroll taxes.

Heavy construction occurring in the Alberta oil and gas fields can be characterized as challenging, given the sometimes harsh conditions and demands on both equipment and workers. Consequently, the trials of heavy construction project management are many.

As we’ve said, companies relying on spreadsheets, documents, or email threads to track things like equipment rentals, purchase orders, inventory shipments, and invoices are dealing with inaccurate, incomplete, and/or duplicated information. This is the cause of many problems, including loss of profits as a project gets stuck in downtime waiting for a part they didn’t know was out of stock.

Do you remember when filing cabinets were a staple in the office? And then, even when technology started taking off, maybe you weren’t quite adverse to the idea of using technology, but still – certain types of critical information, like client contracts, lead developments, and all that project documentation just seemed safer physically within arm’s reach.

Now that you’ve expanded your business, however, there are several issues you might be having. One being that with so much new business, you and your staff are spending all of your time thumbing through what seems like a million client folders to find the right document. Another being that maybe you’ve expanded so much that you have more than one location and/or the need to work both on location and out of the office. In that situation, you don’t even have access to client or contract information because your filing cabinet isn’t anywhere near you.

The success of heavy construction project management is in the details.

And the best way to manage details is with good software. Many business owners are still relying on old methods for managing their projects, their paperwork, and their people. Consequently, the profitability of a project can be put at risk simply because of a lack of the right technology tool: Sage 300 ERP.

As the owner of a construction company, you’re used to wearing many hats in the office and out in the field. What’s crucial to the profitability of your projects is knowing where budgets stand and making sure payment is on time for employees, vendors, and other third-party suppliers.

With the growth of your business, you find yourself away from your home office more and more. Consequently, you can’t initiate the payment process in a timely manner like you could before your expansion took place.

Every business must make decisions that impact efficiency and, ultimately, their bottom line. These decisions must be made while also attempting to grow – opening a new branch office, hiring more employees, etc.

Old methods of handling workloads and scheduling via emails, phone calls, and playing phone tag with voice mail remove your business from the competitive arena. To stay on top in the current economy means that you must be able to communicate with your employees at all times. Simply having an office with a secretary to take messages no longer cuts it.

Read more about Sage here: 

Project management for heavy construction is only as efficient as the  software you’re using, so while it’s definitely easiest to grab an online template or throw together an Excel spreadsheet, those types of cheap fixes won’t help you in the long run.

Tracking project costs