What is FIRE
FIRE is a software product that allows service companies to be more profitable. It reduces the amount of work you and your employees perform
to invoice clients, produce reports, pay employees, track assets and operational information, and generally run your business.
The basic philosophy of FIRE is to make it easy to capture all job information
once, by the person doing the job. Then get FIRE to do the work for
you -- all the information is already there to automatically generate
invoices, pay stubs, revenue report, failure analysis and alerts, and almost any
other critical piece of information you can imagine. Why should you have
to manipulate spreadsheets and re-type data to get what you need. The
simple answer is: you don't.
Here are a few key capabilities FIRE offers: Expand All
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Invoice and Get Paid Faster
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read more ... With FIRE it's possible to have an invoice generated and out the door
within hours of your service delivery, regardless
of how remote.
Here's how it works:
Your employees creates the invoice on-site.
The field ticket is uploaded to the FIRE website.
The ticket is routed and quickly approved internally.
The invoice is printed and sent.
Reports are run, no re-entry needed into accounting, etc.
Your client pays your easy to read, consistently priced invoice.
All relevant quotes / bids, as well as applicable dispatches are available to your field employees, along with an up to the minute price list. So there are no pricing
mistakes, no math errors, no illegible pages, no forgotten tools or directions, and you can even add customer specific notes and contact details.
In addition, there is no time delay in routing invoices through
mailbags, couriers or in-trays -- tickets are available from anywhere
via the FIRE website.
There is no time wasted in re-entry. Whether you are using an Accounting / ERP system like Quickbooks or SAP, Microsoft Navision or Simply Accounting, FIRE
integrates to it and completely removes the need to re-key data.
And FIRE even integrates to many of your customer specific systems. For example, FIRE has a tight integration with ADP / DO2's Open Invoice system, so you even
know when your vendor has disputed or approved your invoice without ever leaving FIRE, and you can fix it and re-submit it immediately.
So why are you spending so much time on a process as critical to your business as getting paid, but which could be taken care of so easily?
Even though most companies strive to have a single price book upon which all invoices are based, the reality is often
that field employees are using older versions, and/or custom price books are made by different offices. If that isn't
hard enough to control, typically different sales groups or individual people are using customized price book upon which to bid and quote work.
In this situation, it's almost impossible to produce a report comparing
discount across clients, the profitability of each service, or even
just get consistent pricing across your company.
Then there is the issue of basic math problems, forgotten charges, illegibility, and even lost paperwork that can lead to a disturbing amount of lost revenue.
FIRE directly addresses these problems by doing the following:
- Allows a single price book, which is always up to date for all users
- Quotes are based on this book, and available to all field personnel
- Fewer credit notes are created
- Approvals are fast and automatically routed and tracked
- Math errors are eliminated
- The problem of lost invoices is eliminated
- Invoices are always understandable thus reducing disputes
- No mistakes in re-entering information into other systems -- accounting, payroll, etc.
- All changes are auditable, and a full history of all invoices is always at your fingertips.
Just imagine how happy your client would be to get an invoice they
can read, has consistent pricing, and which is clearly comparable
to their original bid.
In many cases FIRE can pay for itself just by resolving these issues, and picking up the money just being left on the table.
Pay Employees Easier and Faster
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Most service companies pay their field employees a bonus or compensation rate for remote work in addition to their base salary.
However, the rules for calculating
this bonus can get complex, particularly if
it varies by location or business unit. This results in large amounts of time spent every two weeks or month to gather the information required,
apply the rules, approve the amount and get it documented, entered into the payroll system and paid.
Since all the information to pay bonus is typically gathered on the field invoice, then FIRE can automatically
do all of this work for you. The typical compensation report which is automatically generated by FIRE includes:
Automatic calculation of all field bonuses
- be it day rate, hourly, invoice percentage, etc.Highlighting of all "special" cases
- holiday pay, double crews, training bonus, etc.Export of report to Excel
Optional integration / export to payroll system
Individualized PDF reports per employee
Can be run at any time, up to the minute
- and used for profitability / accrual reportsTied into Credit notes
- for optional "reversal" bonus
So stop spending all that time creating employee compensation reports. Click the button to run the report, then focus on how to make your business even more profitable.
Safety & Incident Reporting
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If safety isn't one of your #1 priorities, then likely your clients are making it that way.
But how do you ensure you are consistently tracking the problem, notifying
the right people, satisfying yourself and your customer that it's resolved, and that you're taking steps so it won't happen again?
Although FIRE will never be a replacement for field employees phoning the appropriate people when something happens, here's how
FIRE can help make your company operate more safely, and satisfy your client that your are doing so.
- Forms for field personnel to tracking Incidents - from Near Miss to more serious events, from operational to asset related
- Automatic notification (email & within system) to appropriate people, based on incident severity, customer, incident type and management level
- Tracking of incident review by each employee, and full log of events to follow-up
- Workflow for assignment of incidents and tasks to appropriate people for resolution
- Ability to attach pictures, detailed analysis forms, police reports and other documents
- Reports by incident type, customer, business unit, district, etc.
- Printable PDF summaries for customers / employees
- Integration into Asset module, to relate problems directly to tool failure, then route for work-order fixes
- All information stored in database forever and can be referenced to any other information tracked by FIRE.
So not only can FIRE help you and your people operate more safely, but we can prove it to you and your customers.
Operational & other Forms
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If half of your field paperwork is for invoicing your clients, the other half is usually for tracking what happened out there.
Most companies working in the
field require their employees to fill out
Where are your assets, what is their utilization, how profitable is each one, when did they fail, are they getting fixed, and are we charging them out correctly.
The answers to all of these questions needs to be at your fingertips, but all too often it's lost in filing cabinets, endless spreadsheets, or paper trays - if it's available at all.
However FIRE does make all of this information available to you at the click of a button. It sounds too good to be true, but we've proven
that FIRE can easily do the following for you:
- Allow field employees to select the assets without any additional work or thought
- Generate automatic asset utilization reports, including revenue
- Give latest status [Available, On Job, Failed, etc.] both on a report, and/or while you're on talking to the client building a dispatch
- Allow for creation of Work orders to track and assign all fixes of assets, and keep a history
- Simple searches by serial number, category, name, last ticket on which it was used, etc.
- Keep a full log of all activities, including:
- Where last used [location, ticket, by whom, date, which unit]
- Repairs [when, why by who, what cost and what was used]
- History of all past Jobs, Transfers, Repairs, etc.
- Other equipment with which it was used
Stop chasing after your assets. Instead, concentrate on the more strategic questions that really need your time: how to focus on the assets making the most profit,
and how to improve on the ones needing attention.
Every one of our clients tells us reports one of the most important components of FIRE. Our most common question is: "Can you help me with a report to...".
We deliver on reports. FIRE provides the following list of reporting options.
But just as importantly, after implementing FIRE at your company our staff has an excellent understanding of your data, and how it pertains to your particular business.
So when you contact us for ideas or help with reports, we actually know what you want, we know how to help, and we more than likely will have some recommendations for what you
might want to add or change.
"Standard" Reports
These are over 30 reports that come with the FIRE "out of the box", and include numerous Revenue breakdowns, Utilization, Sales Commission,
Ticket Tracking, Safety / Incident, etc.Included "Custom" Reports
These typically consist of one employee Compensation report, and one accounting export report. Although the delivery of these reports
is included as part of the standard FIRE pricing, customizations are required for every customer. Everybody pays their employees differently, and everybody has a different accounting
system setup. Therefore we have build in hours to allow for us to customize these reports to your specific needs, as part of our standard implementation deliverables.FIRE Custom Report Builder
FIRE comes standard with a custom report builder. This allows for access to any data within the system, based on SQL
commands, allowing for the quick creation of simple to comprehensive reports.Third Party Reports Integration
If you have a license and knowledge for third party reporting
systems such as Crystal Reports, Jasper Reports, Jet Reports,
or practically any other commercial reporting software, it can
be integrated into FIRE. This way you can continue building your
own complex reports using the same tools, but based on the huge
amount of information found in the FIRE databaseData Export / Warehousing
Some of our clients would either like to extract the entire contents of the FIRE database and re-structure it on another system,
or build web services / XML feeds to or from FIRE. We have extensive experience with this kind of integration for reporting too, and are happy to discuss the details
of what you require.
Don't just enter your data - report on exactly what you would like from that data.
+1-403-296-5886
4030, 918 16 Ave NW