Credit Control: Getting Your Customers to Pay You on Time
Credit control is the discipline of getting your customers to pay you on time — setting credit terms and limits, watching the aged-debtors report, and chasing overdue invoices before they turn into cash you can't get back. Here's how the reminder sequence, statements and DSO actually work, and why doing it by memory quietly leaves money stuck in debtors.
Purchase Requisition: The Approval That Should Happen Before You Buy
A purchase requisition is the internal request to buy something, raised and approved before any purchase order goes to a supplier. It's the checkpoint where spend gets tested against budget and authority — the step that decides whether money leaves the business on purpose or by accident. Here's how the requisition form, approval routing and requisition-to-PO conversion actually work, and why skipping them is how maverick spend creeps in.
Quoting and Estimating Software: Pricing the Job Right, Up Front
Quoting and estimating software builds a consistent, accurate price for a job before you win it — pulling from a shared rate and materials library, applying standard markups, and versioning every quote. It's how you stop under-quoting on hope, keep pricing consistent across whoever's quoting, and close the loop between what you quoted and what the job actually cost. Here's how it works.
Timesheet Software: Capturing Labour Time Against Every Job
Timesheet software captures the hours your team works against the specific job or task they were spent on — clocked to a job code, split into billable and non-billable, approved, and fed into job costing, payroll and client invoicing. Here's why paper and spreadsheet timesheets quietly lose billable hours, and what accurate capture actually changes.
Preventive Maintenance Software: Scheduling Repairs Before They Become Breakdowns
Preventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by calendar time or by usage — so it gets attention before it breaks, not after. Most small manufacturers run their machines to failure and pay for it in stopped lines. Here's how time-based and meter-based PM schedules, a real asset register, maintenance work orders with checklists, and the right spares on the shelf move you off the breakdown treadmill.
ABC Analysis for Inventory: Put Your Control Where the Value Is
ABC analysis sorts every SKU into three classes by annual usage value, so the stock that ties up most of your cash gets most of your attention and the long tail gets left alone. Here's how to rank the lines, where to draw the A/B/C cut-offs, and what you actually do differently for each class once you have.
Scrap and Rework Tracking: Turning Wasted Material Into Root-Cause Fixes
Scrap and rework tracking means logging every binned or fixed part with a reason code at the moment it happens, so you can see where and why parts fail. Most shops only find out from the month-end material variance. Here's how to capture scrap and rework on the floor, cost it properly, and turn the data into fixes instead of a number nobody can explain.
Job Costing Software: Tracking True Cost Per Job as You Go
Job costing software captures labour, materials and overhead against a specific job as the work happens — so you see estimate vs actual while the job is still live, catch it going over before delivery, and quote the next one sharper. Here's how it works.
Three-Way Matching: Catching the Invoices That Don't Add Up
Three-way matching is the check that lines up the purchase order, the goods received note and the supplier invoice — so you never overpay, double-pay, or pay for goods that never arrived. Here's how the match actually works, where tolerances belong, and why doing it by eye collapses the moment your volume climbs.