Choosing a sign management software to help you administrate your estimate, production and delivery cycles requires no deliberation for many people. Less clear is what exactly they need in their sign company software. To get a sense of what you should be asking before you make any decisions, follow these tips.
Know Your Needs
You know you need something to help keep you organized, but what exactly? More to the point, what type of sign production project management system do you run? Do you have multiple small jobs going at once? Or is your operation more geared towards a few, very large jobs? Or do you run a “hodge-podge” of sign jobs of varying sizes and complexity? Do you follow a typical project management critical path or is your production cycle looser? Do you require sign-off on everything before moving forward or with familiar clients is there a little leeway?
These are just some of the questions you need to ask yourself before making any sign management software decisions. Your answers to all of those questions will help frame your needs, which will help determine what you should purchase.
Know Your Budget
How much do you want to spend on your sign business software? It’s easy to get swept up by the bells and whistles on your typical software and end up making a purchase that does a lot of cool stuff you will never use. Typically, the more bells and whistles, the more complex your software and the more expensive. It is easy to run over what you planned on spending, but you can avoid that by knowing beforehand your upper limit and using that as a way to rule out software packages.
Ensure Remote Access
If you have a software package that is not remote operation capable, you are severely limiting what you can do in terms of customer service. Being able to draw up estimates and give accurate timelines as well as pick out materials on site with your customers shows that your company has its act together. The appearance of competence in this regard is critical, especially with new clients.
These three qualities are vital to picking out a sign company software package that can attract customers, keep you organized and keep you on schedule. Without them, the job of sign production becomes a lot harder and prone to mistakes.
