November 26, 2014 in Inspection Business, Mobile Devices

A Quick Way to Make $8000 More Every Year on Home Inspections

Are you interested in making extra money every year? If so, with some time-saving strategies and the aid of home inspection software, you can save both money and time.

Save 15 Minutes on Each Inspection

While it doesn’t sound like much, 15 minutes per inspection can really add up. If you perform 300 inspections a year, that’s 75 hours that you’re saving annually. You could perform about 20 more home inspections in that time, and at $400 per inspection, that’s an extra $8000 in your pocket!

Save Time at the Inspection

The first way to save time is to reduce the time spent at the actual inspection. Get contracts signed ahead of time. This not only saves you time on site, it also reduces your liability. It’s a great idea to get paid before the inspection as well, to save time on site, and avoid the negative experience of asking for money at the end of the inspection. Great report writing software allows clients to pay online before the inspection.

Save Time on Report Writing

Save time by eliminating unnecessary descriptions like the weather on the day of inspection or whether the utilities were on, etc. Unless something caused a limitation on your ability to inspect the home, it doesn’t need to be reported. This also means omitting long, drawn-out descriptions of components in the house that list every feature and material. This is a very simple way to save time.

Some say the weather is important to record, in case you get a complaint later. The National weather office does a great job of that for you, and the information is free and authoritative anytime you need it.

Use Home Inspection Software

Using high quality home inspection software can save you tons of time on repetitive typing and organization. It’s good to use software that eliminates any need for data entry more than once. For example, once you’ve typed in the name of the client, it should automatically appear wherever it needs to be in the report. It’s great if the software also remembers comments and notes you’ve used before so you can save time typing them out again. What are the odds of making a mistake when copying and email address? We think they’re pretty high.

Your software should allow you to find what you need quickly and efficiently. A large library is great, but if you can’t find what you need, it doesn’t save any time. Tools like templates allow you to add multiple entries with one click, a significant timesaver.

Software that works on your mobile devices, such as your phone, also adds a lot of convenience. This way, you can take photos and notes and insert them right into your report from the same program. Your phone becomes the most effective field data collection tool in the world! Throw away your notepad and stop transcribing from notes into your report.

Below, you can see an image of Horizon’s software app on the iPhone:

We believe photos are an important part of every home inspection report, and that good reports include captions under every photo. Writing captions for 30 or 40 photos is extremely time-consuming. The best software provides auto-captioning, which can reduce report writing time by half an hour.

High-quality home inspection software should also provide you with a completion check before publishing to ensure that you haven’t missed anything, as well as an executive summary that is automatically generated at the beginning of the report. Automatic archiving of reports stored together with work orders makes life easy down the road. And because they are stored in the cloud, you have access to your entire company history anywhere in the world you have Internet access. No more scrambling or sorting through boxes looking for old reports!

Using state-of-the-art home inspection software is one of the best ways to save time, perform more inspections, and increase your revenue. Using just some of the things we talked about here should save you well over 15 minutes per inspection and easily make you an additional $8000, each and every year To learn more or download your free trial of Horizon home inspection software, click here.