Janitronics: Integrated Software and the Competitive Edge

For building service contractors and commercial cleaners, profit margins tend to be razor thin, hovering around 6.5 percent of revenue, according to the IBISWorld Janitorial Services in the US: Market Research Report published in June 2017. From that same report, it’s noted that contractors in this industry face intense price-based competition and high labor costs that run an estimated 50 percent of revenue. With these market conditions, understanding profitability at a micro level is more important than ever. This type of insight is vital to controlling costs, protecting margins and getting a true picture of the business’s financial performance. Perhaps nobody understands this better than Steve Goetz, the director of finance for Janitronics Facility Services, a janitorial firm of 1,800 employees based in Albany, New York. Janitronics has been a TEAM Software customer since 1996. Goetz describes the job costing component of WinTeam – TEAM Software’s integrated financial, operations and workforce management cleaning company software solution – as the most significant advantage of using the enterprise level software. WinTeam’s unique job-centric methodology ties every transaction in the software to a job number or service location. This means labor, materials and other direct costs can be budgeted down to the job level. Financial, operations and workforce management data is integrated within the same system, eliminating the need for multiple software packages and data exchanges.

“The biggest benefit is having all the data in one spot and getting upto-the second job costing,” said Goetz. “When we look at financials at a high level, it’s hard to see where the problems are. Ten jobs might be good, and ten might be bad, but it averages out to be on budget. With job costing, you can actually see trends at each job.”

This level of insight enables a proactive approach to managing the business. And, more data shared within the system means deeper insight and increased efficiency. Goetz noted that company leadership has made a concerted effort to pull as much data and as many processes into TEAM’s cleaning company software integrated solutions as possible.

“[TEAM has] one of the few software systems out there with payroll integrated right into the system,” he said. “When we run payroll, it’s instantly in job costing. “Everything is done inside the program from health insurance, to cutting weekly payroll checks,” he continued. “The efficiency we gain from that is unbelievable. We can see timekeeping punches in the same system, The biggest benefit is having all the data in one spot and getting up-to-the-second job costing. When we look at financials at a high level, it’s hard to see where the problems are. Ten jobs might be good, and ten might be bad, but it averages out to be on budget. With job costing, you can actually see trends at each job.

Another plus of an integrated cleaning company software, according to Goetz, is the ability to scale it to meet business needs.

“As we grow and add new jobs, we only have to update in one place, and we can have it in the system really quickly,” he explained. “We are at the point where we can scale very quickly without having to add new staff.” While job costing and integrated data can help manage a commercial cleaning business effectively, proof of quality service plays a key role, too. In an industry where services are relatively undifferentiated and companies compete on price, a major factor in winning and retaining business is the quality level of the work. To that end, Janitronics has incorporated TEAM’s quality assurance solution into its unique cleaning methodology to conduct inspections and correct deficiencies in the field.

“One of the unique things we do are customer service audits the next day to gauge the effectiveness of the cleaning,” he added. “We give those audits to the client.”

Overall, Goetz says a company would be hard-pressed to find the depth and breadth of functionality, as well as the kind of value Janitronics has found with TEAM’s solutions.

“We always joke that we don’t know how any company in this industry does it without TEAM Software,” said Goetz. “There are no other solutions out there that do what TEAM’s solutions do. For what we pay, there isn’t anything remotely close that has the same level of functionality that we get with TEAM.”

Learn how Janitronics Facility Services, a janitorial firm of 1,800 employees based in Albany, New York, implements cleaning company software to gain efficiencies, perform job costing, integrate data and stay ahead of the competition in the cleaning industry.