Oh they have been around awhile, not sure exactly how long but I would say over 30 years. I'm not saying they don't keep track of anything, they keep track of how much is spent and all but I don’t think it is accurate enough for what I am talking about. What I mean is we know how much we are spending on equipment overall but I think there is some cost that are missing when talking about each piece of equipment individually. I think the boss has a pretty good idea of what it cost to operate most every piece of equipment from experience and partly from tracking cost, as well as competitor rates.
As far as production reporting, I don't know. If you are talking about man hours to complete certain type of jobs, then I guess we don't really keep track of that as far as I know. We do know how long it will take to complete a job though and I would say most of the time we are right on the mark. I mean we have laid enough pipe to know how long a job will take to do a job. If its 10 miles of 12 inch pipe we know how long that will take, or we can figure based on the job scope pretty easily. We don't lose money on jobs.
As far as double doing the work, I think it would be harder to keep track each piece of equipment with quickbooks; I'll try to explain why or partly why. First I have to get my parts either shipped in or I drive an hour and a half to get them, so when I buy stuff for servicing it is kind of in bulk and not for each piece of individual equipment. To separate 3000 or 4000 dollars in filters and fluids out would take a long time to do using PO's or whatever. I have some equipment (CAT's and Fords) that all take the same filters and not all of them are serviced at the same intervals (I might service one backhoe 3 times a year and the other 4). So I cannot just say that I will divide all of those filters equally between the two.
The way I do it is I have all my parts entered in my computer; all I have to do is change quantity on hand. Then when I service it I create a work order and add that part to it, plus the time it takes for me or my mechanic to do it and there’s my cost for servicing (it’s a pretty quick process as long as I can get my other mechanic to fill out the form I created). It takes me maybe a mintue to fill out a work order. Same goes with other parts but I only get most of them when I need it. Then for stuff like lights, electrical wire, fluids that can go to any piece of equipment there is no way to put a specific piece of equipment on a PO either, that has to be done after it is installed. To me to communicate all that to the secretaries would be very difficult and it seems easier for me to do it and keep track of it.
As far as the hour meter goes, I don't think we ever bill out less than the hour meter shows. If it is a bid job, that piece of equipment gets billed to that job for the entire work day and at most it’s going to run the entire work day but probably less. If it is a by the hour job that piece of equipment starts getting billed out as soon as it starts getting loaded on the truck to leave the yard. So the hour meter should never show more than what has been billed out on it. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why you would want cost per billed hour and not per machine hour, I think I might see why but would like an explanation?
We are not a very big company; I am responsible for 76 pieces of equipment: 29 on highway vehicles, 27 trailers and 20 pieces of equipment. We don't do multi-billion dollar jobs or anything. Most of our jobs are in the couple million dollar range and lower, most of the time lower. We run 6 gang crews a day, all day, pretty much every day (well not every sat and sun). We do have our slow weeks but we still have 3 dedicated gang crews that always will be working. I say this because I don't see how a multi-billion dollar company can keep track of this info thru accounts payable. I would think they would have a completely separate account for their maintenance department and a dedicated secretary to keep track of that specific part of the business and the company would receive an overall cost analysis from them, but I don’t know I am kind of new to all of this.
We are not a big enough company to have separate secretaries for different areas. We have two secretaries and they pretty much stay busy putting on all of our job tickets, accounts payable and receivable for everything we have now, much less trying to break everything down to separate equipment. They do break it down where they can and I think we do have separate accounts for each piece of equipment but I think it is overlooking a large part of the cost the way we do it now.
I may look into trying to keep track of the cost the way you are saying but I don't think it will be possible to keep the information accurate enough to get a good cost estimate on equipment. Maybe it would be close enough though, I don’t know.
We are small and I take care of quite a bit of stuff and hope one day I can help run it, that is a big reason I am trying to get all of this stuff straightened out now. The two owners/my two bosses are a really good guys and very smart but I think they have been able to get by without having to keep track of information like this because they are very good at estimating these cost/figuring them out with the information they already have. I would just like to have this information for my own sake pretty much and to help the company but I don’t think we have to have it. They support me in what I do but I don’t think they are going to completely revamp the company for stuff like this. They are happy with the way it is and I don’t blame them.
Sorry for the long post and I hope part of what I said is made sense. One last thing, I love the company I work for and the two owners are the by far the best I have ever worked for.
