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Plant_Equipment_Management

Managing plant asset costs correctly is a vital part of plant hire and construction site management. Plant assets are notoriously difficult to manage from a financial perspective. Not only is there depreciation but also plant repair, servicing, diesel, operator and tax considerations. Whimbrel has developed a number of plant management modules that can be configured around your company’s requirements.

Our custom designed plant management applications typically cover the following:

  • Generate plant hire quotations with senior management authorisation
  • Diesel consumption and oil costs
  • Manage the company’s equipment fleet register
  • Creates service, wear checks and general job cards
  • Control the equipment servicing including historical data on past services
  • Alerts to order kits for machine services
  • Calculate minimum hours, breakdown hours, rain time, operator and invoice hours
  • Integrate with plant tracking solution
  • Specilised plant invoicing module
  • Plant location, utilization and productivity
  • Stores and parts dispatch management: books machine parts into stores and out of stores onto job cards
  • Activity based costing – calculating an hourly cost rate for each item of equipment
  • Revenue vs. cost reports with details of the profit or loss on each item of equipment
  • Custom designed plant templates
  • Custom designed plant costing reports
  • Shared plant asset registers between site, customers and the plant department
  • All reports can be exported to Microsoft Excel with all the formatting automated

Commercial software and software integration considerations
Plant management systems are required by a myriad of different construction companies, from plant hire companies to contracting companies which own their plant. Commercial plant management software has been designed with all these different companies in mind, and can be overly complex with far too many features for the average company. Another difficulty regarding commercial plant management software is that it is notoriously difficult to integrate with the company’s existing accounts’ packages.

Problems with using accounting packages to manage a construction company’s plant
One of the main considerations when using accounting packages to manage construction assets is depreciation. Accountants generally use the tax depreciation rate to depreciate plant. This works for financial accounting purposes but is very misleading in measuring current asset values. Invoicing from an accounting packages is also problematic for plant hire companies as clients often need more specific plant management financial reports.

Benefits of custom designed plant management software
Whimbrel has developed a plant management package to suit most plant management needs, from plant hire, to earthworks, pipe laying, rail, demolition and general contracting. Whimbrel is able to customise solutions to your needs and your personnel’s computer skills, while ensuring you only have the necessary features. At Whimbrel we also specialise in software integration and can integrate Whimbrel’s plant management software with your accounting package or any other existing software solutions.

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