Running a successful painting business involves many administrative tasks, from client and workforce management to estimating and invoicing. With so much on your plate as a business owner, some assignments may slip through the cracks, leading to missed deadlines and poor customer service. To prevent these misfortunes from affecting your bottom line, use the best apps for painting contractors to streamline business operations.
In this article, we tested various software applications for painting contractors and narrowed down the options to four user-friendly software solutions. Read on to find the best workforce management, color visualizer, estimating, invoicing, and communication software for your painting company.
Looking for the best app for painting contractors?
Find out how to track their time, locations, mileage and jobs with TImeero.
Timeero is the best app for painting contractors looking to track field employee time, location, and mileage. It also enables business owners to create effective schedules for timely project delivery.
However, Timeero alone can’t handle the whole range of activities within your business. Besides tracking crew members, you need other tools for estimating, invoicing, managing clients, and visualizing client projects. Here’s a sneak peek into our list of apps recommended for painting contractors and why you should consider them:
Timeero — Best GPS location and Time Tracking App For Painting Contractors
ColorSnap — Best Color Visualizer App For Small Business Owners
Joist — Best Estimating and Invoicing App For Painting Contractors
Podium Texting — Best Communication App For Painting Businesses
Top 4 Apps For Painting Contractors
We compiled four cloud-based solutions that cover nearly all bases for your painting company’s operations. Our list contains software options to schedule employees, monitor field activities, keep clients in the loop on project progress, and create accurate estimates and invoices.
Let’s get into the details of each solution’s strengths and weaknesses.
Timeero — Best GPS location and Time Tracking App For Painting Contractors
Timeero is the best workforce management software for painting contractors. It helps you schedule employees, monitor field employee activities, track time accurately for job costing and remuneration, and track mileage for tax write-offs and reimbursement.
The software doesn’t require a huge upfront investment or expensive gadgets. It works on Android and Apple mobile devices and is super easy to use, so the non-tech-savvy employee in your workforce will figure it out within minutes.
Scheduling and Dispatching
Timeero offers an easy-to-use scheduling module.
Scheduling painting jobs can be challenging. This is true whether you are working on large-scale commercial projects that are often short notice with fast turnaround times or small-scale projects that are dependent on weather conditions and activities in the building.
Timeero enables you to create customizable schedules, keeping the factors mentioned above, as well as employee availability and expertise, in mind. You can schedule employees so that the highly skilled crew members work on intricate tasks, whereas the junior painters work on low-risk tasks. This promotes consistency and quality in each project.
The app also helps sidestep scheduling conflicts that often cause project delays. If you schedule an employee for eight hours on a specific day, Timeero locks that time window. If you attempt to schedule the same employee for a shift that overlaps the locked hours, Timeero won’t let you.
When you publish a painting job schedule, Timeero notifies the assigned employees instantly. The employees can decline or accept the schedule depending on availability. You can quickly find coverage for unassigned shifts, which prevents the nuisance of last-minute planning.
The permission to decline shifts should be accompanied by a strict policy to prevent employees from rejecting a shift “just because”.
Each scheduling assignment provides a job address and description. Employees don’t have to bombard the manager or client with calls to ask for directions. Plus, with the job description, you can provide a checklist or instructions to ensure crew members stay on the same page.
Time Tracking
Timeero offers a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Labor costs take the biggest chunk of each project’s expenses and can eat away at profits if not managed well. Timeero, the best time tracker for construction and painting industries, tracks employee time accurately, eliminating time theft to prevent accidental or intentional labor cost inflation.
You can create geofences—or virtual boundaries—around the job site and restrict employees from clocking in or out outside the designated zone. If an employee attempts to clock in outside the geofence, Timeero will not let them. This prevents offsite punching, where employees clock in a few blocks from the job site when running late.
Timeero also curbs buddy punching with its facial recognition feature. The app takes photos of employees as they clock in and compares them to their profile photos. In case of a mismatch, the feature flags the timesheets and notifies the manager immediately, prompting them to investigate the case.
Other essential time tracking tools include overtime and break trackers. The latter enables you to enforce your break tracking policy to prevent potential litigation and hefty penalties.
GPS Location Tracking
Timeero is the best GPS tracking app for painting contractors, thanks to its real-time GPS location tracker. The GPS tracker relies on employees’ mobile devices, so you don’t have to spend a premium on tracking devices. It also monitors employee location only when they are clocked in to provide privacy and prevent potential employee pushback.
The GPS tracker gives you a bird's-eye view of your field team’s activity. You can open the “who’s working” tab to see where each employee is located in real-time. If an employee claims to be at the job site and the client says otherwise, the GPS tracker will set the record straight.
Segmented Tracking
With Timeero segmented tracking, employees only need to clock in once at the start of their shift.
Picture this: You send an employee to get supplies, but they meet a long-time friend along the way and decide to have lunch at the local McDonald's. An hour later, the employee dashes out to pick up supplies before heading back to the job site. Without a proper accounting system, you’d assume the employee spent the whole hour completing the assigned duties.
Segmented Tracking gives you a blow-by-blow account of the employee’s trip. It tracks the trip and breaks it down based on the stops taken, giving you intricate details such as time spent at each address. You’ll see when the employee entered and left McDonald's and the supply shop and be able to tell how much time they spent at each address.
However, segmented tracking isn’t only for catching rogue employees. It helps calculate the time a field service employee spends at a client’s address for an hourly job. This enables you to compensate employees and bill the clients accurately.
Mileage Tracking
If an employee works on multiple sites during a shift and uses a personal vehicle to travel between locations, you must compensate them for mileage. The story remains the same if you require employees to make a quick trip to pick up supplies. To compensate employees fairly, mileage must be tracked accurately.
Timeero uses drive-detection technology to track employee miles with precision. It detects vehicle movement and tracks mileage for every drive that exceeds the predefined speed threshold.
For example, if you set the minimum speed to 4 mph, the app will log miles for every drive over 4mph. This prevents the app from logging miles when the driver is walking or stuck in traffic, which boosts the accuracy of each mileage log.
In addition, Timeero mileage logs meet Internal Revenue System (IRS) standards for tax purposes. It tracks mileage along with the required details:
Starting and ending points
Starting and ending times
Total distance covered
Purpose of the trip
With IRS-compliant mileage logs, you can claim tax write-offs. According to the latest IRS mileage rates, every business mile you track reduces your taxable income by 67 cents. Timeero tracks every business mile, enabling you to maximize the tax write-off benefit.
Offline Mode
If the job site is located in a remote area without internet coverage, don’t worry. Timeero works flawlessly without the internet thanks to its robust offline mode. Its offline mode tracks employee time and mileage with unwavering accuracy and stores the data locally. When the employee's device is reconnected to the internet, the app instantly syncs the data to your system.
Timeero pricing: 14-day free trial. Pricing starts at $4 per user each month.
ColorSnap — Best Color Visualizer App For Small Business Owners
ColorSnap Instant Paint tool works with both Android and iOS devices.
A clear depiction of the final product usually lands you a contract deal with your client. Using an array of adjectives to describe the final product works sometimes, but visualizing painted walls and layouts always works better. The Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap app allows you to visualize painting projects and is a must-have solution for painting contractors.
You can use the app on your Android or iOS devices to match colors from photos, explore colors, and visualize virtually any room or wall with a swipe of a finger. Some of the most notable features of this painting software includes:
Instant Paint Feature
The instant paint feature eliminates guesswork about how the end product will look. Just take out your smartphone, snap a photo of the client’s current walls, and try different colors on each wall until you find one the client likes.
The tool leverages cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) to visualize the wall in the chosen color in real-time, enabling the client to make more confident color choices.
Color Match Tool
The Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap Match Pro enables you to turn simulated colors into reality. If a client chooses Ivory white, Match Pro ensures you deliver exactly that and not any other shade of white like cream white or eggshell.
Scan the color, and Match Pro will match it to a corresponding Sherwin-Williams paint color. You can even generate the color code to purchase the exact paint that the client requested.
Other Key Features of ColorSnap:
Share color samples
Kaleidoscope feature
ColorSnap integrations: Pinterest through API
ColorSnap pricing: ColorSnap Match Pro costs has a one-time fee of $79.99.
Joist – Best Estimating and Invoicing App For Painting Contractors
Joist offers a user-friendly estimate module.
Joist is a reliable estimating and invoicing software designed to help painting contractors save time and expedite payment with professional invoices and quick estimates. It works flawlessly on iOS and Android smartphones, making it ideal for field project managers and employees.
Providing Job Estimates
When a client okays the color selection, the next step is to provide an estimate for the job. Estimating a paint job is a critical step that can make all the difference between winning or losing projects. Remember, you’re probably not the only contractor wooing the customer unless it’s a repeat business.
Joist is a reliable job estimator that enables you to bid accurately — not too high or too low. It enables you to create an accurate estimate for a painting job to win more clients and fill up your schedule for upcoming months without hurting your profitability.
Creating estimates is as easy as selecting the most-used services in your painting jobs item catalog or saved painting estimate template. You can also make the most of deposit requests, cost markups, job photos, and payment schedules to enhance the accuracy of each estimate.
Painting Job Invoicing
Most painting contractors like to receive payment for jobs in their account as soon as the project is complete. Joist offers an easy-to-use invoicing tool to speed up the invoicing process and get paid faster.
Project managers don’t have to wait until they return to the office to invoice the client. When the job is done, the manager can quickly create an invoice on their mobile app and send it to the client instantly. Clients can sign the invoice on the go with the in-app signature functionality and return it.
Joist allows managers to attach project photos to the invoice as proof of work. They can also customize the invoice to meet your company’s standards, such as adding the company logo, which give each invoice a professional look.
Other Key Features of Joist:
Integrates with accounting software to streamline payment management
Client management
Homeowner financing
Joist Integrations: QuickBooks Online
Joist pricing: 60-day free trial, Free plan, pricing starts at $14 per month.
Podium Texting — Best Communication App For Painting Businesses
Podium offers a unified dashboard for all customer and lead communication.
Podium Texting provides an all-in-one messaging platform to keep clients in the loop about their job progress. It’s not a stand-alone customer relationship management (CRM) solution, but it helps manage client communication to streamline job management and ensure projects meet expectations.
Some of the benefits of using Podium include:
Centralized Client Communication
It’s not uncommon for leads and clients to use multiple channels to communicate with project managers. A client can send a text message on WhatsApp today and communicate a change in plan via social media the next day — it happens.
Podium centralizes all customer conversations in a unified inbox. Whether they are using social media, WhatsApp, Google click-to-message, or Slack (via Zapier integration), Podium pulls the messages into a single streamlined inbox. This enables you to view and respond to each message and phone call in a single thread.
No vital instruction will ever get lost. This ensures that the managers, business owners, clients, and crew members are on the same page. As a result, your business can deliver projects that meet or surpass clients' expectations.
When used for lead follow-up and nurturing, Podium speeds up and simplifies the conversation, significantly improving conversion chances.
Keep Clients Updated
You can use Podium to update clients on job progress. The business software allows you to share project photos for progress checks, which is vitally important in the painting business. You can also use text reminders to ensure clients show up for meetings to prevent delays that could derail project delivery.
Other Key Features of Podium Texting
Google and Facebook reviews
Text marketing automation
Website contact forms
Phone and calling
Web chat
Payment management
Podium integrations: Airtable, Calendly, FieldEdge, Freshbooks, Housecall Pro
Podium pricing: Pricing starts at $399 per month.
Build The Perfect Technology Stack For Your Painting Company
Your most pressing needs should be the guideposts for picking the best app for your painting company. If you’re just getting started, you don’t have to implement all these apps at once. You can take a phased approach, rolling out the most critical app first.
For example, if you’re grappling with rampant time theft or non-compliance with break rules, you can implement Timeero first. With geofencing and facial recognition tools, Timeero will eradicate offsite and buddy punching in one go. It will also streamline mileage and location tracking, crew scheduling, and labor cost monitoring.
Start a 14-day free trial today to use all of Timeero’s features. No credit card is required—create your account and start using the app immediately. While you're at it, book a free consultation call with our excellent customer support agents to learn how to customize Timeero to your business needs.
Best App For Painting Contractors: FAQs
Which GPS App Is Most Recommended for Painting Contractors To Navigate Job Sites Efficiently?
Timeero is the most recommended GPS app for painting contractors looking to navigate jobs and sites efficiently, thanks to its real-time GPS location tracker.
What Are the Top-Rated GPS Apps for Painting Contractors To Manage Job Sites and Travel Efficiently?
Timeero is the top-rated GPS app for painting contractors to manage job sites and travel efficiently, thanks to geofencing, segmented tracking, and mileage tracking features.
What Features Should I Look for in a GPS App Specifically Designed for Painting Contractors?
GPS location, time and mileage tracking are the vital features to look for in a GPS app for painting contractors.
Are you seeking better insight into your painting contractors’ hours, locations, and mileage?
Samson is a mathematician turned content marketer specializing in SaaS and Tech content. He focuses on the practical aspects of software systems while keeping abreast of the industry’s cutting-edge principles to create informative and engaging content. When he’s not writing, Samson spends time playing or watching soccer.
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