Switching
What switching actually costs you, in the week it happens.
Every software company will tell you their onboarding is painless. Here is the version with the awkward parts left in: what it takes out of your week, what nobody warns you about, what standing still costs instead, and when you should not do it at all.
Moving a traffic control business onto new software is not a software problem. Payroll runs on it. Invoices come out of it. If it goes wrong, crews are paid late and clients are billed wrong, and both of those cost more than any subscription. So the question worth asking is not what the software does. It is what the move takes out of you, and whether the thing you are moving away from is costing you more.
The week itself
Where the time actually goes.
Before the week starts
Two to three hours of one person
Somebody has to export what you have: staff, vehicles and plant, clients, and your schedule of rates. That is a morning of clicking Export in whatever you run now, plus the awkward part, which is deciding what is still true. Most contractors find a third of their staff list is people who left.
The set-up
None of your time
The account is configured on our side, not yours. This is the part people expect to cost them a week and it costs them nothing, because handing a contractor an empty system and a manual is how implementations fail.
The office session
Ninety minutes each, once
The scheduler learns the allocation board. The payroll officer learns the pay run and where the hours came from. The estimator learns quoting and rate cards. Each person learns the part they use, not a tour of every screen, so nobody sits through an hour that is not about their job.
The crews
Five minutes each
Sign on, prestart, photos, docket, sign off. If the field side needs more than five minutes it is the wrong design, because crews change between jobs and nobody runs a training day for a night shift.
The first real week
The honest one: everything twice
This is the cost nobody tells you about. For one week you run the new system and keep the old one going, because you will not stake a pay run on software you have used for four days. Double entry, for a week, on whatever volume you do. Budget for it and it is an inconvenience. Discover it and it feels like a failure.
The first pay run
Longer than usual, once
Your first pay run through anything new takes longer, because you check it line by line against the old one. You should. We stay close through that run and the first invoice run, because those are the two that decide whether anyone trusts the thing.
Add it up and the honest total is about a day of one person’s time spread across a week, plus ninety minutes each for the office, five minutes each for the crews, and one week of doing everything twice. That last one is the real cost, and it is the one that gets left off the brochure.
The other side of the ledger
What standing still costs.
A switching cost is only worth weighing against the cost of not switching, and that one is invisible because it arrives in small pieces every week.
Hours reconstructed on Monday
Hours written down three days late are rounded down, not out of dishonesty but because nobody remembers whether the crew stood down at 4:15 or 4:45. Half an hour a shift, across the shifts you run, is the number worth putting on paper.
Dockets you cannot produce
A client queries an invoice from six weeks ago and asks for the signed docket. If finding it means a drive to the yard and an hour in a filing cabinet, you have already spent more than the line was worth, and sometimes you write it off instead.
Tickets that expire mid-job
A controller whose card lapsed on Tuesday is a controller you cannot bill for on Wednesday, and possibly a conversation with the client about who was on site. The cost is not the renewal. It is the shift.
The Friday you spend invoicing
Not the invoicing itself, but the assembling: matching dockets to jobs to rates to purchase orders. It is a day a week for somebody, and it is the same day every week.
We are not going to put a figure on that for you, because we do not know your rates and any number we invented would be marketing. The arithmetic is on the pricing page with the inputs left visible, so you can put your own crew count and charge-out rate in and see what falls out.
Against our own interest
When you should not switch.
There are weeks when the answer is no, and a salesperson who cannot say so is not worth listening to.
- You are inside three weeks of a job that will take everything you have. Move after it, not during it.
- Your rates are about to change across every client. Bring the new ones in, not both.
- The person who would run the change is the person who is already doing two jobs. A migration with no owner drifts, and a half-migrated business is worse than either whole one.
- You are hoping software will settle an argument about how the business should run. It will not. It will encode whichever answer you give it.
None of those are permanent. They are reasons to move in six weeks rather than this one, and a move made at the right time costs a fraction of one made in the middle of a job.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
How long does switching take?
It depends on how much you bring across, so we will not put a number on it before seeing your lists. What is fixed is the shape: we set up the account, your lists come across from a spreadsheet, your office team is trained on the parts they use, your crews are shown the app, then you run a real week through it.
Do we have to bring years of history across?
No, and most contractors should not. Bring what is live: current staff, plant, clients, rates and open work. Keep the old files for lookups. Importing years of dead records mostly imports years of mistakes.
What format does our data need to be in?
A spreadsheet. CSV or Excel, exported from whatever you run now. It does not need to be in a particular shape, because we do the mapping rather than asking you to rename columns to suit us.
Can we run the old system alongside for a while?
Yes, and you should for about a week. Nobody should stake a pay run on software they have used for four days. Plan for the double entry rather than being surprised by it.
What happens if it does not work out?
Monthly plans run month to month with no minimum term and no exit fee, and you can cancel from inside the product. Your data is yours and you can export it at any time. After termination we hold it for 60 days so you can export it or come back.
More detail on how the move runs is on getting started, including how your existing lists come across and what the training covers. If you would rather just ask, send us a message or ring 1800 662 747.