In 2006, Jim started his own electrical company from the ground up in Medicine Hat, Alberta. The team takes pride in their deep involvement in their community and in taking care of their city. At any point, Jim’s might be running as many as 20 projects, ranging as much as $3 million in electrical work.
The team prioritizes safety through its broad array of services, including electrical maintenance, fire alarm system installations, data cabling, emergency lighting inspection, and much more. In the last few years, the company has seen dramatic growth with more high-value projects and more projects overall.
The team quickly realized that managing 5x the number of people in this landscape with manual processes was unsustainable.
Paper was taking too much time
Everything we did in our business was manual — all paper and handwritten for every project and every task. We especially wanted to address the challenges we were facing with payroll and paper timesheets — they were simply taking too much time between tracking them down, deciphering handwriting, cross-checking with their schedules, and crunching the numbers.
Finding an effective solution
We looked everywhere to find a cost-effective solution that was right for us. Over the course of 4 months, we evaluated information from the internet, participated in lengthy demos, and sought advice from other contractors.
When we found Assignar, we didn’t think we would use all the features but chose them because their team embraced our preferences and catered to them, like changing the terms on the platform to match the language we use in the office.
A smooth transition
The transition to Assignar was smooth and our Customer Success Manager was instrumental in that. She spends all the time necessary to help us stay focused on our business goals and leverage Assignar to accomplish them.
We’d be lying if we said the entire team was ecstatic about the switch to Assignar. The change was a bit harder for some, but we stuck with it because we started seeing results.
“Some of the guys are used to doing paper timesheets and work orders, but now we can hold them accountable,” says Lanny Meier, Office Manager.
saving a full day on payroll
What’s been especially great about Assignar is that the same features we thought we didn’t need are slowly becoming important to our business and efficiency.
“We haven’t changed what we do, we just do it much faster with Assignar.” – Lanny Meier, Office Manager
At the end of the month, we run in-progress reports and payroll, which used to involve manual data entry and number crunching. Some of the features we didn’t think we would use have become a key part of our end-of-month routine.
| Charge items | Help us keep track of what we charge our field technicians |
| Scheduler | Approve the hours and the charge rate |
| Data export | We can immediately take all of our data to a spreadsheet |
| Reporting | The data and charts help us understand our business |
There is a huge difference in the time it takes to do payroll because we’re not having to track down and decipher hand-written timesheets.
“Assignar handles half of the work. I’m saving a full day on payroll.”
Another notable change is that we’re not losing documents anymore and we’re completing more work orders. We used to have work orders that weren’t being processed or even some that went missing. In reality, we’re able to deliver more, higher quality work, while improving the health of our business and aiding growth.
“Assignar not only makes my job easier, but it has helped the company financially because we’re more on time with work orders, more accurate and people pay faster,” says Meier.
constantly finding new uses
Things are always changing in the contracting world. We work in a fast-paced environment and things rarely go as perfectly as they are planned. At Jim’s Electric, we’re moving through that tough environment with efficiency.
We would encourage Assignar customers to embrace all the features and think about how you might be able to leverage them.
“We’re constantly finding new uses for the software. It’s just loaded with features and functionality,” Meier concludes.
