Did you know that CHAS members receive a 2-month free trial and 20% off your first year with Powered Now, the leading app that enables you to complete invoices and quotes on the go.
Powered Now are a software company dedicated to helping the trade industry prosper and succeed, particularly SMEs.
We know that the arrival of smartphones has the power to hugely simplify paperwork for builders, gas engineers, electricians and many other trades. It’s our sole mission to make that a practical reality.
The paperwork nightmare
Paperwork is the bane of the lives of many people in trade businesses, particularly when they are running smaller companies and don’t have dedicated administrative staff. Even when they have such staff, keeping track of paperwork and handling it efficiently remains a challenge.
In general, most people who start trade companies are better with their hands than with office work, and they truly hate paperwork. The freedom that running your own trade company brings can be both profitable and liberating. But this can be spoiled by long evenings spent writing quotes and issuing invoices and then turning hand-written notes into statutory documents.
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The opportunity to improve
Screen based touch smartphones are the fastest adopted consumer device in the history of the world. Ten years after the iPhone first arrived, billions of similar phones had been sold and half of the world’s population had one. Today, we are approaching saturation point all around the world. Today, everyone is familiar with what smartphones can do.
With their unique combination of ease of use, power, mobility and connectivity, smartphones hold the key to ending the paperwork nightmare. Powered Now is focused on helping this process along. Run by entrepreneurs who have previously built software products used by tens of thousands of small businesses and with one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs as their largest shareholder, Powered Now is already solving paperwork problems for thousands of trade businesses.
The benefits for business owners with staff
Whether the business has dedicated staff or not, Powered Now greatly increases efficiency by having all the details of the company’s work in one place. In addition, there is the ability to schedule staff through a powerful shared diary.
Users of the system also report many other benefits including being paid faster, providing information to their accountant more easily, winning more business, seeing where their team is and generally being more in control.
The benefits for sole traders
The average trade person who is a sole trader saves around three hours a week using Powered Now. They also report many of the benefits experienced by businesses with staff including being paid faster, providing information to their accountant, winning more business and increasing their invoicing.
The nitty gritty of how it is done
We all know some of the outrageous claims that are made in advertising. Powered Now always tries to back up its claims with an explanation of how the benefits are achieved.
Powered Now let’s you run your business from a smartphone, a tablet, your mac or your PC. The smartphone and tablet work even when there is no signal so there’s no need for a paper-based backup. Everything automatically synchronises together and is copied up to the cloud. You can break, lose or be robbed of your device and no information is lost. You simply log on from a new device and all the information is downloaded automatically.
If you have someone doing admin in an office, that works fine too.
Powered Now’s first design aim was to make the system as easy to use as possible. Many tasks are accomplished by a step-by-step process rather than on a single confusing screen with lots of options. There are a lot of powerful functions, but these are mostly hidden behind settings which only need to be configured once. Powered Now staff will help with these settings during training, which is provided free of charge.
Another design aim was to make sure that all information is only ever entered once into the app. All customer’s names, numbers and email can be copied from your address book and the full address can be looked up from the postcode. After you have your customer details stored, you never have to enter them again. That’s a lot less typing and writing.
Quotes and invoices can be done on site or outside in a van as well as back in the office. VAT and other calculations are worked out automatically. Quotes can look highly professional with minimum effort and can be sent by email and texted or printed. Common items that appear on invoices or quotes can be set up in the product catalogue and pulled into the quote or invoice thus saving any re-keying.
A quote can be turned into an invoice with a single click. You are automatically told when an invoice has been opened and a quote has been opened, accepted or rejected. All of this helps to win more business as well as saving time.
Your team are tracked on a map and instructions are always available to the team to tell them where to go and what to do. The time spent at an appointment is recorded. Team chat enables everyone to communicate with each other, all within the app. This enables your team to run more efficiently.
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Communications
Arguably the most helpful aspect of Powered Now is that it automates much of the problem of communicating information between management, workers in the field and customers. The shared diary combined with tracking means that everyone that needs to can see both where people should be and where they actually are.
Every user in the business is looking at the same comprehensive information about customers, projects and commitments.
All communication by email and text sent out to customers is recorded along with the customers actions such as accepting or rejecting quotes. Powerful notifications are able to tell both staff and customers about what is happening, in real time.
Targeted at both residential and commercial work
Straight forward customers residing at a residential address are catered for, but so are commercial customers or landlords with multiple premises and separate billing addresses. Multiple people and multiple contact methods can be stored.
Trade related tax issues
Powered Now meets the critical requirements related to HMRC with built in reduced VAT rate capabilities. Powered Now also provides full support for the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) where the business may be acting as a contractor or a subcontractor or both.
The Domestic Reverse charge for VAT is also supported.
Statutory documentation
Powered Now has significant UK statutory paperwork built in with over 50 built-in forms and certificates. This includes an extensive library of electrical, fire alarm and emergency lighting paperwork. Gas, plumbing and oil are also covered along with forms for several other specific verticals like pest control. There is a simple template for RAMS too.
Time keeping
As each field worker attends an appointment, they can click on their smartphone to indicate that they have arrived and then later indicate when they leave. At the same time, they can update the job status in order to provide information on the status of the work back to management. All time spent on appointments is available to report by user, by project or by customer.
Purchase ordering and costs
Purchase orders can be raised in Powered Now and sent to suppliers. On receipt, supplier invoices can be created from purchase orders with a single click, and then amended as necessary. Employee expenses can be raised and tracked for payment. There is a quick way to enter supplier invoices if that is needed.
Accounting
All necessary details to complete a set of accounts are captured including sales invoices and credits, supplier invoices and credits and expenses, along with payments.
Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT is fully supported, with one of the HMRC assessors telling Powered Now that we had the easiest to use solution that he had seen.
Xero is arguably the most popular system in the UK for SMEs and Powered Now has a comprehensive Xero interface designed to pass all information required so that a full set of books can be produced. The various account codes and tax settings can be specified, along with what information will be transferred to Xero and what will be transferred back into Powered Now.
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Paper trail
The great benefit of Powered Now is that with everything held electronically it is always easy to find things. Statutory paperwork, notes, quotes, invoices, payments, customer communications, pictures, drawings, signatures and details of all appointments are stored together in a timeline that can be scrolled through to see the full history of each project over time.
Each type of document that can also be searched for independently and found by document type, by customer as well as by project.
The bottom line
Powered Now is one of several software companies helping trade companies with their paperwork. Powered Now has a host of real benefits that can easily be realised, has the largest customer base, the widest management experience and the most financial firepower. You should take a look. The friendly Powered Now team are always happy to give a demonstration of the systems capabilities.
Get Started Now
Sign up to Powered Now with a free 2-month trial and 20% discount on your first year.
