5 Reasons Why Diaries Suck from Hiary on Vimeo.
1. It Can Be Lost, Stolen or Damaged
Please don't tell me that you've never lost your diary not in 19 years so there's no point worrying about it . A. I don't believe you not for a second. and B. I've booked too many services through people who operate out of diaries to know better. No seriously I've ordered thousands of skip bins and you know what I learned? A lot of companies regularly loose track of a bin or two and many more find it hard to make sure they invoice and get paid. Seriously, if this is you I want to help.
Now that I have that off my chest we can talk about making sure your business data is correctly backed up and stored for invoicing and reporting. Every bit of work or data I produce I backup somewhere so that in the event that my office burns down or laptop is stolen or any number of unlikely events occurs my work and information will still be available to me. For me that means I'll still be able to bill clients and provide Hiary without interruption to my business. You should be doing the same for your business.
Copying jobs from one diary to another (or spreadsheet) and then leaving them both in the same office is not going to help in the event of a catastrophe. You need to take the second step which is to take one copy (likely the primary copy) with you and keep it somewhere safe overnight. I do this with my laptop which is my backup connection so I'll always have the ability to fix issues on the go and have a copy of any work in the cloud somewhere. I don't care if you use skip hire software like Hiary or not just for heavens sake keep your information safe
2. Diaries Don't Calculate Stock
Unfortunately diaries don't calculate bin stock levels for you without you working out a bin stock tally system. This adds to the information to copy or otherwise backup into the cloud and while it would be possible, it would also be cumbersome. If you're interested in how you could make sure you know how many bins you have available only using a diary comment below and I'll do a write up.
3. Keeping Track of Invoices Is Tough
The number of times that I have been miss invoiced or mistakes have been made billing me is out of this world. You can't afford to be making billing mistakes! Customers aren't likely to tell you if you didn't send them an invoice and if you overcharge them they are unlikely to become or continue to be repeat customers!
There are a lot of stories I could share in this area about work not being invoiced for months or invoices being issued for more than they were supposed to be for. Often the issues arises from human error and hence running a manual system is prone to these issues.
4. Relaying Jobs On The Phone Sucks
Trying to get an address from a customer over the phone can be difficult at the best of times. Add to this trying to relay this address to another person over the phone and you have a recipe for leaving a bin at the wrong address.
5. Tracking Pickups / Where Your Bins Are Located Is Problematic
This is another area where you can get into trouble, leaving bins on customer sites for extended periods and not putting your asset to work. Addressing this is possible with paper / spreadsheets, on a separate notebook or diary you should write down the deliveries for the day and then copy the locations from the previous day without the pickups you completed that day. Builders will likely want to have the bin onsite for extended periods but other users are likely to need far less. Maximising your bin turn over rate will maximise your margins on the investment in the bins that you own.