A Good Tool for Scheduling Painting or Remodeling Projects

Update: As of Jan­u­ary 2016: The blog fea­tur­ing Smartsheet is still just as pop­u­lar with my clients. Noth­ing new to report. 

Man­ag­ing the sched­ul­ing of paint­ing or remod­el­ing projects can be a real jug­gling act. When I was active in my fam­i­ly’s paint­ing busi­ness, the sched­ule seemed to adjust and change dai­ly. Some­times, the headaches hap­pened when a crew called last minute and said they were not fin­ished on a Fri­day and need­ed 2 more hours on Mon­day morn­ing to fin­ish up, and they did not call their next project to let them know they would not be there Mon­day morn­ing. With­out the right tech­nol­o­gy, a home improve­ment sched­ule can be one of the most painful parts of run­ning a business.

It appears that a num­ber of build­ing con­trac­tors have set­tled on using pro­grams like Microsoft Project over the years and have been hap­py with the prod­uct. I have not looked into MS Project recent­ly, but MS Project seemed to served that niche fair­ly well dur­ing the years that I was active in the trade.

Yet, many paint­ing con­trac­tors I work with and have met over the years did not or still do not use MS Project and instead rely pri­mar­i­ly on MS Excel, Google Sheets or just a white­board. My dad’s com­pa­ny still uses a white­board and it works. How­ev­er, the three men­tioned above still are not the best option if you real­ly want to be more effi­cient at sched­ul­ing and avoid some of the headaches of job shuf­fling when you encounter prob­lems like inclement weath­er, or jobs not fin­ish­ing on time.

Smartsheet is the Answer

I have writ­ten about Smartsheet in a num­ber of pre­vi­ous posts. Smartsheet is a leader in the cloud com­put­ing project man­age­ment world. They have built a prod­uct that can do what you have always wished a White­board, MS Project, Excel and Base­camp could do if they all played nice­ly with each other.

When you first look at Smartsheet, you would think it is just like any oth­er spread­sheet soft­ware. A blank sheet looks just like open­ing an Excel sheet. Yet under­neath those columns, rows and cells are some very pow­er­ful project man­age­ment tools that can help with mak­ing your sched­ul­ing quite a bit easier.

Once you cus­tomize the sched­ule the way you want, you can choose sev­er­al ways to view the sched­ule: Google Cal­en­dar, Smartsheet Cal­en­dar, iCal, or as a Gantt chart.

If the job is going a few hours over or you just need to move the date, you can adjust the dura­tion of the project. It will move all of your sched­uled projects with­out screw­ing any­thing up! This hap­pens when you use predecessors.

Ok. So MS Office and oth­er sched­ul­ing pro­grams can do dura­tions and pre­de­ces­sors. What makes Smartsheet unique and better? 

Smartsheet also uti­lizes sev­er­al key fea­tures that make it a great option for sched­ul­ing paint­ing projects. One of those fea­tures is called resource man­age­ment. From one screen, you can see if you’ve under or over­booked your team.

You can also upload pho­tos of projects, file attach­ments, share updates and col­lab­o­rate with your team. Final­ly, if you want to dig deep­er, you can make the sched­ul­ing pro­gram into a com­plete project man­age­ment sheet that helps with tasks for each job. It all depends on how you want Smartsheet to work for you and your paint­ing company.

You can cre­ate most of the sheets your­self — it is not all that com­pli­cat­ed to learn. Yet, Smartsheet is a very pow­er­ful cloud pro­gram. The more you use it, the more you will be amazed at the things you can add down the road. The sky’s the lim­it for what it can do for your busi­ness. I know a num­ber of paint­ing com­pa­nies that use Smartsheet on an advanced lev­el for account­ing, project man­age­ment, job cost­ing, project task, col­lab­o­ra­tion, web forms, hir­ing, train­ing and much more.

The cost of Smartsheet is more than rea­son­able. It starts at just $14 a month!

If you would like help cus­tomiz­ing Smartsheet, let me know! My team can help.