Bella Straw & Mulch Saves Time and Grows with SingleOps
The Customer
Bella Straw provides premier pine straw and blown mulch installation services in the Bluffton and Myrtle Beach areas of South Carolina. The company uses state of the art mulch blowing equipment and serves clients ranging from country clubs and golf courses to residential homes.
The Challenge
“We were using a combination of QuickBooks and Google Calendar to run the business. We were creating work orders in Microsoft Word, billing with QuickBooks, and I was sending text messages to the crews. That was fine when the business was small, but we began growing rapidly and started having more than three crews going. It was difficult to keep track of everything, and there wasn’t much collaboration. We needed a better system to keep up with it all, specifically job costing and work orders. We also needed a better way to organize the whole schedule,” explained Brett Kelley, Chief Enhancement Officer, Bella Straw & Mulch.
The Solution
“Many applications are super complicated and were built more for service-based landscape businesses doing routine maintenance. But our business is more one-off, and we didn’t need those bells and whistles, although we did want a tool complex enough for scheduling and job costing.
“I knew the owner of Swift Straw in Atlanta and he was one of the original users of SingleOps and recommended it. SingleOps is simple enough and easy to navigate, and has all the functions we needed to schedule, and job costing is super simple. We’ve been using it for nearly three years now,” stated Brett.
The Results
“The implementation experience was pretty easy. I could put a work order in on the first day, then it took four to six weeks to train my staff and we were good with it. It wasn’t difficult at all.
“Between salespeople, two branch managers, staff at two different offices, and our office manager, we have a total of five people who can enter work orders,” said Brett.
Managing Jobs and Inventory
Bella Straw & Mulch uses SingleOps to enter work orders and schedule jobs. It provides a way for the company to look in real time and enables them to see what products must be purchased to ensure adequate inventory.
“Scheduling jobs and ensuring inventory are the best ways we use SingleOps. I also like the mobile functionality. And when you’re about to send an email to a bad address, SingleOps warns you that it didn’t go through the last time,” stated Janell Morris, Office Manager, Bella Straw & Mulch.
Generating and Sending Proposals via iPad, Streamlined Scheduling
“We have multiple people in sales and business development who use SingleOps for creating quotes. Many of them also use an iPad to generate and send proposals all through the system.
“We also enter work orders into SingleOps and use it for scheduling. Our management team is able to assign jobs to each crew and view all the jobs on the calendar. SingleOps provides a lot of collaboration,” explained Brett.
Accounting and Reports
With SingleOps, Bella Straw can generate and send invoices. SingleOps purchase orders integrate with job costing, inventory, and vendor management, enabling users to cut down on paperwork. Bella Straw also runs reports in SingleOps including the communications report and the invoices report, to make sure emails didn’t bounce and data is sync with QuickBooks.
“The financial side of SingleOps is great. I also like the ability to view a client’s profile and see the entire history of the work we’ve done for them, including a graph with total revenue and profit,” added Brett.
Saving Time Every Week
“I estimate SingleOps has saved us five hours every week by making us so more efficient overall. It’s great for scheduling and job costing, and the project side works well,” concluded Brett. I recommend it to any company looking for a software solution.