Page not found – Go iTalk https://goitalk.com The Official Blog for Go iLawn & Go iPave Online Property Measurement Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:00:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Snow Removal Service Diagrams https://goitalk.com/enhance-your-strategic-outline-diagrams-for-snow-removal/ https://goitalk.com/enhance-your-strategic-outline-diagrams-for-snow-removal/#respond Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:45:30 +0000 http://goitalk.com/?p=2560 A few weeks ago we shared three photos you should save for every property take off: your blank slate photo, your strategic outline photo, and your closer and communicator photo. These photos are helpful to have around no matter what service you’re measuring a property for, but probably extra helpful when it comes to snow and ice management.

Mapping out snow storage areas, lot obstacles, equipment routes and contact information for property managers, crews or subs prior to an event might help you get that extra minute you need when you’re in the midst of servicing clients at 3 am.

Snow Storage Diagram

Creating a diagram for the property owner or manager, your crews or subs, and your office staff that shows where snow will be stockpiled on the property can help you manage expectations and operations for a snow event. Our area measuring tool will help you draw a perfect circle of any size to help you point out stockpile locations.

Snow Storage Diagram Only

Snow Removal Obstacles & Important Property Information

Marking obstacles is important for the safety of your crews and your equipment. Speed bumps, drive through clearance heights, handicap stalls and property manager contact information can be easily called out with our labeling tools. Or you can use a photo program like Snagit to call out the obstacles a little louder. See an example of a snow removal obstacle diagram that has been labeled with a combination of our labeling tools and Snagit ‘callouts’ below.

Snow Diagram with Snagit labeled obstacles

 

Snow Removal Equipment Routes Diagram

Demonstrate proper equipment routes in your snow removal photos to help crews and subs get the job done at maximum efficiency. You can use our linear distance tool to draw arrows in your photos, or if you want a louder approach try an inexpensive photo program. You can see examples of both of these methods below. Our linear distance tool will create the smaller blue arrows and I used Snagit for the larger red arrows.

Snow routes labeled in Go iLawn and Snagit


What do you like to include in your snow and ice management diagrams? Share your tips with us in the comments section of this post.

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Shifting Your Business – The Only Way To Grow. https://goitalk.com/shifting-your-business-the-only-way-to-grow/ https://goitalk.com/shifting-your-business-the-only-way-to-grow/#respond Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:44:38 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6529 Anyone running a service industry business, whether it’s in landscaping and lawn care, asphalt maintenance and seal coating, snow removal, irrigation, or whatever it is you do, unless you had investors, you probably had to start slow.

Gear 1 – The Slow Start

You have to start somewhere, and most companies start slow, with a small initial investment, a client base that’s started from scratch, and a lot of hard work and long hours by the one person or small group of people who are starting up the business.

  • Starting slow normally means one truck out in the field executing jobs… maybe even working solo until you can justify bringing in employees.
  • Starting slow means taking on the jobs you can get now, while trying to find better work to do in the future.
  • Starting slow means you probably handle all the selling, bookkeeping and back office work you can and pay an accountant for the hard stuff.
  • Starting slow means bringing in $100,000 or less of revenue to start, and you soon reach a limit of how much work you can do.

Starting slow gains you momentum. It allows you to prove to yourself that you’re going to succeed and prove to your clients that you’ll be around to do the work they need. And it provides the base you need to launch a company that can do more.

Think of your own slow start as first gear. Your initial investment, the work you did, the equipment you used, this whole package was Gear (1). It got you rolling, but eventually you reached a point where you had to “shift” to move faster.

Gear 2 – Building a Million-Dollar Company

As your company grew, you shifted to a new model. This Gear (2) package meant more equipment, more employees, and bigger jobs. This model can take you from $100k or so of revenue to a million or two. To get there successfully, you have to overcome new challenges, ones that didn’t effect you during your slow start. Here’s just three of them:

  • Management – When you were doing $100k, you worked alongside your employees (Assuming you had any) every day. You were onsite to manage every detail and make every decision. To bring in a Million, you may not ever visit each jobsite or even talk directly with each employee with any regularity. Your crew leaders make decisions onsite, and you can only try to hire and retain employees that make good decisions on your behalf.
  • Ordering Materials – Early on, you could order everything yourself by calling a vendor, or even showing up to pick up materials and ordering them right then. Now you probably keep inventory to manage your supply chain and order in greater bulk to earn volume discounts. If you have staff that’s good at procurement, they might be saving you big money over time by getting better deals and better terms.
  • Fleet Maintenance – Getting started, you could maintain a single vehicle or small fleet on your own or using consumer-focused service centers for everything from oil changes to brake and tire replacements. Now, your needs and more complex, and you need more planning. You may be employing dedicated maintenance staff to keep your vehicles performance-ready, or you might be pushing maintenance work onto salaried full time employees.

We’ve seen lots of service-industry companies grow to $1Million+ by figuring out how to shift from a solo slow start to an efficient multi-crew provider. There are probably several of these companies in landscape, asphalt, and commercial maintenance in every town of 50,000 people across the USA. But eventually, this model reaches its maximum too.

We see companies all the time that are “stuck in second”, and some are fine with staying there. They’re successful. They’re very profitable. It took them years to get here. And they can keep going on like this indefinitely. But what if they want more? What if you want to grow your business to a regional platform with multiple facilities and revenues closer to $10 million? That’s when you need to shift gears again.

Gear 3 – The Systems-Driven Company

Up to this size, a company can be run by one founder who personally controls all the important decisions. We call a company that’s managed this way “Personality-Driven”, and there are many successful Personality Driven companies in the industry. But eventually, any company will reach a point where that one person controlling everything becomes a bottleneck that prevents growth.

And that’s when building systems can be decisive.

Once you reach a certain size, there are just too many variables, too many moving parts, and too much going on for these same practices to remain effective. Any growing company needs to make the right decisions. But as you get bigger, you need to make more of them, and they need to be made faster. That’s when you need to shift from a “Personality-Driven” company to becoming a “Systems-Driven” company to reach the next level of growth.

You’ve already made changes to get here, but this shift requires you delegate important parts of your business. You’ve already delegated many operational decisions just to get where you are, but this next step can be much harder because it requires you to fundamentally give up control of financial and strategic decisions, not just operational ones.

But just like shifting from a small solo operation to a bigger one with multiple crews and a bigger footprint, companies at this stage need to shift gears if they’re going to grow further.

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Three Simple Ways to Estimate Costs https://goitalk.com/three-simple-ways-to-estimate-costs/ https://goitalk.com/three-simple-ways-to-estimate-costs/#respond Fri, 30 Nov 2018 17:17:05 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6520 As we enter the last month of the year, many contractors will finally have some time to spend thinking about strategy and how to run their businesses better next year.

If your estimating process has been a guessing game rather than a professional skill, now’s the time to think about how to do it better. And building a consistent system is the best way to take the guess work out of your estimates.

There’s one main pre-requisite to building an estimating system though. You need to be able to estimate your actual costs to perform work. At a base level, this means understanding your costs for labor, materials and overhead, so you can set a standardized rate you can use to estimate your costs to perform work.

There are detailed ways to calculate all these numbers, but for the sake of time, you may want to start by focusing on getting started quickly. With this in mind, here’s three simple cost estimating tricks you can use as a starting point.

Labor

To understand labor costs for any job, requires you to know your “labor productivity”, the average work your team can do in an hour of labor, and your average cost-per-hour to employ this labor.

Per-Hour Labor Costs

Per-hour labor costs are easy to calculate by adding up your actual costs for wages, taxes, and benefits.

Labor Productivity

You can get a rough estimate of productivity using work you’ve already completed. Take the total volume of work on a specific job site and divide by the amount of labor it took, to “back into” an average production rate to use for estimating. If you can isolate different parts of a job to and estimate your production rates for different specific tasks, even better!

Materials

Material Cost is the total cost of materials (Mulch for example) needed to complete a job.

Some crews pick up supplies on the way to the job site and can cost out materials on a ‘per-job’ basis. But calculating average material costs will still help them with forward-looking estimates.

Take a look back at past jobs and find a blended average for the prices of each material, then apply this number to future estimates. This method blends in cost changes that happen over time and levels out price variations between different vendors you use.

Overhead

All the other things you pay for that help get crews onto the jobsite are overhead, and they have cost you need to account for too. These include fixed costs like leases, and insurance and variable costs like fuel and utilities.

A simple way to calculate overhead costs is to add up your fixed costs over some time-period (a year for example), then divide the total cost by your billable hours over the same time. This number will be the average overhead cost per hour of labor, which is easy to apply to job costs when calculating your “Real” costs.

Perfect, vs ‘Good Enough’

There are more accurate and more-detailed ways to calculate each of these numbers, and, if you have the time, you may want to use them.

The most-accurate way to get labor productivity, for example, is by benchmarking, literally following crews around with a stopwatch and testing how much work they can do per hour/minute and using this “real-world” data to set goals.

But simple, rough estimates provide a useful starting point and allow you to introduce a consistent quoting system into your operation. As you begin tracking numbers, you can adjust your rates up or down to dial in on a better estimate, or you can apply more-detailed cost accounting methods later and update your numbers as time permits.

The End Goal

The important thing is to start building a consistent quoting system now, so you’re not guessing as you prepare quotes next season.

 

Good Luck ~ the Go iLawn / Go iPave team

 

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Happy Thanksgiving, 2018 https://goitalk.com/happy-thanksgiving-2018/ https://goitalk.com/happy-thanksgiving-2018/#respond Tue, 20 Nov 2018 16:09:16 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6506

It’s that time of year again, when we pause to remind ourselves what we’re thankful for.

And we’re thankful for… You!

Thanks To Our Customers.

Here at Go iLawn / Go iPave, we like to take this time each year to thank our customers, who make it possible for us to do what we do every day.

We’re glad we can serve you this year and hope we can continue to do so next year and beyond. So our thanks to you, and have an extra slice of pie this thanksgiving; you deserve it.

We’ll be closed this Thursday and Friday to spend time with friends and family, but feel free to get some work done if you need to. As we like to say… It’s always sunny on Go iLawn!

For 2018.

In 2018, we also have a little something extra to be thankful for… the first anniversary of the New Go iLawn, which we introduced last fall.

It took us most of 2017 to build a completely New Go iLawn, which puts our tried and true property measuring tools on a new foundation of the latest technology. We’re happy to report that we’ve converted almost all of our customers to the new system, and more make the switch every day.

Users of the New Go iLawn get great benefits like auto-saving, and cloud storage on a modern platform that’s mobile ready and works with almost any browser (But avoid Internet Explorer 11, you heard it here first). We’re excited to think where we’ll be this time next year, and we’ve got some great enhancements planned for our next release. It’s a big deal for us, and we hope you like it too… let us know in the comments.

If you haven’t tried it yet, click one of the links above to request a free trial.

Happy Thanksgiving ~ The Go iLawn/Go iPave team.

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Evaluating Your Sales System https://goitalk.com/evaluating-your-sales-system/ https://goitalk.com/evaluating-your-sales-system/#respond Mon, 19 Nov 2018 16:37:22 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6496 To create the ultimate selling machine, you need to build a system.

Selling is the first touch for bringing revenue into your business, and for your business to grow, you’ll need to sell more work to more customers. Companies build consistent sales systems to make this process go faster and run smoother. If selling seems harder than you think it should be, maybe this is something you should try too?

Building a better selling system will have immediate value, and the first thing you’ll want to do is take a look at how you do sales now.

Evaluate Your Current Sales Process

Before you start building a sales system, you first need to ask yourself a few key questions, like:

  • Is my current sales system efficient?
  • Can it be done by anyone in my company, or only by one or a few key employees?
  • Is it rational and consistent?

Dig a little deeper by asking yourself some strategic questions and evaluating your current processes to see how well they perform.

Is my current sales system efficient?

How long does it take, in elapsed time, on average, from the first customer inquiry until that customer has a high-quality quote in hand?

How much staff time does it take you to produce that quote? Measure your performance now, so you understand your current efficiency.

Can it be done by anyone in my company, or only by one or a few key employees?

The important part of this question is the word “Can”.

Even if there are only a couple of employees controlling the quoting and sales process now, is this a ‘transferable’ skill?

Is your quoting system so complex or custom that only you (or someone with it a lifetime of experience) can do it right? What would it take to train someone to replace them? Could you train a quality employee to start doing ‘regular’ quotes within a week or so, or would it take much longer?

Is it consistent?

If you quoted two identical properties, would you end up with the same quotes? Are your quotes built around a consistent model? Are they based on the volume of work you do and your costs to perform it, or does you rate per square foot vary from job to job?

System Requirements

If the answer to any of these three questions is no, you have a potential problem on your hands. And now is the time to fix it.

A true sales system uses consistent inputs and applies standard processes. Because the work is standardized, it becomes scale-able, and it’s much easier to teach others to do it. In the end, you create an efficient way to generate accurate quotes that always lead to profitable work.

Go iLawn / Go iPave can help.

One great thing about our Go iLawn and Go iPave software is that they can help you build an efficient and effective selling system. When you know the site and can break down each part of it into the square footage of work to be done, you have the basis for a facts-based quoting system that:

  • Is efficient
  • Can be done by anyone
  • Is consistent

And showing your customers a complete sitemap and a spreadsheet of all your measurements gives them the confidence to choose you.

Give it a try today by starting a free 14-day trial

You’ll be glad you did. ~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave team

 

 

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Streamline Your Snow Business https://goitalk.com/streamline-your-snow-business/ https://goitalk.com/streamline-your-snow-business/#respond Wed, 31 Oct 2018 16:08:44 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6482 Our Go iLawn / Go iPave Software helps Snow and Ice Management professionals estimate jobs, generate fact-based quotes, and communicate effectively with customers and crews.

For Estimating:

Measuring parking lots, driveways and roads to produce estimates for snow and ice management can be a time consuming, laborious process- especially if you’re doing it on-site with a measuring wheel.

But not with Go iLawn. Our high resolution property photos and property measuring tools help you drastically reduce the time it takes to accurately measure properties for snow removal estimates.

For Quoting:

Go iLawn helps you measure every surface on your job-site. You can measure the square footage of areas, the linear distance of lines, and the number counted items. And you can arrange all your measurements into groups to help organize your quote.

With this facts-based evaluation of the job, you can produce estimates that are based on your time, effort, and materials (your costs) to complete the work. This helps you eliminate guesswork and quote with confidence for every service you provide.

For Creating Site Maps:

From identifying parking lots, drive lanes and sidewalks, to marking lot obstacles to avoid and where to pile snow, Go iLawn helps you clearly communicate your professional snow removal strategy to your customers, subcontractors and crews.

  • Your customers will SEE what you Are quoting them, and what you Are NOT including.
  • Your crews can SEE what’s on-site to execute the services you quoted.
  • Even contract employees who’ve never been to the site or worked for your company before can start fast and execute jobs. Just give them an address and the Go iLawn site map.

How Does it Work?

Go iLawn combines high-resolution property photos and online measuring tools in one easy-to-use application. Go iLawn users can measure any surface in North America.

Need to measure a property during a snow event? No problem! Our photos will deliver unobstructed ‘leaf-off’ views, allowing you to see the bare pavement you need to measure with no tree canopies or snow in the way.

With Go iLawn You Can:

  • Measure properties 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no matter the weather conditions.
  • Quote new work During a snow event to win over new clients.
  • Dramatically reduce drive time (labor), wear and tear on vehicles and fuel costs associated with property measurement.
  • Produce professional snow removal service diagrams for clients and crews.

See For Yourself:

Give Go iLawn a try and Streamline Your Snow Business today! Request your Free, 14-day trial now – Click Here

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What we learned at GIE+EXPO 2018 https://goitalk.com/what-we-learned-at-gieexpo-2018/ https://goitalk.com/what-we-learned-at-gieexpo-2018/#respond Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:27:02 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6473 Every October, we head to the GIE+EXPO in Louisville to meet with our customers and see the Green Industry’s newest advancements in equipment, processes and technology.

This year, we came away with some new insights, and, a week later, we’re ready to share them with you.

Environmental Factors Matter.

GIE+EXPO 2018 had a bigger footprint and longer format than previous years with 3 full days of expo. Wednesday’s normal Dealer Day event was moved up to Noon and the day was expanded so all attendees could enter the indoor show floor from 3-7. The Outdoor expo then opened for all day on Thursday and Friday.

A partial day on Wednesday, coupled with Great weather on Thursday and Friday made for light foot traffic on the inside show floor, as the crowds spent more of their time outside. The expanded schedule and larger footprint meant more time and more ground to cover, so crowds seemed thinner than in past years despite record attendance.

Data Matters.

In past years, many of our visitors said all their estimating was done by physically visiting sites to measure them. This year, we heard that from far fewer people, and only from smaller operators.

More and more of the companies we talked to are using repeatable processes and quantifiable data (rather than gut estimating) to build their customer quotes. This is great for the companies that do it because their process is repeatable and can be done by anyone, not just the one or two pro estimators that have the special ability to quote accurately that comes with 20 years in the business.

This is also great news for the industry, as larger companies are normalizing on a data-driven model of estimating, quoting, and selling. Over the long term, this will remove variations that would cause pressure to bid work at a loss, because companies can understand their true cost to perform work.

Imagery is Newer… And That Matters.

Go iLawn’s 2018 imagery is widespread. Our customers know that the photos they get from Go iLawn are of very high-quality, but in some places, our photos can be a few years old before we get new ones. For me, working the GIE show floor offers an informal survey of our photos, as I look up local properties for landscaping pros who visit our booth from everywhere in the U.S. and Canada (And Denmark, Germany, and Chile this year).

And this year, I saw more imagery from the current year (in this case 2018), than I did at GIE in 2017, 2016, or 2015. To try and quantify this beyond my gut feel, I surveyed the last 20 properties I searched during GIE. Of them, 11 had 2018 photography, including those in:

  1. Indianapolis, Indiana
  2. Knoxville, Tennessee
  3. Kokomo, Indiana
  4. Augusta, Georgia
  5. Louisville, Kentucky
  6. Gun Lake, Michigan
  7. Holland, Michigan
  8. Byron Center, Michigan
  9. Grand Rapids, Michigan
  10. New Westminster, British Columbia
  11. Fort McMurray, Alberta

That’s still a random and informal survey, but it shows the push to update our imagery where our customers do business. And while photo quality is important, photo recency is also worth considering, as properties change over time.

Missing Us At GIE+EXPO Doesn’t Mean You Miss Out!

Lastly, we demonstrated some major enhancements to the Go iLawn (And Go iPave) software at GIE+EXPO this year. If you’d like to try them out for yourself, you can still request your own Free Trial by visiting www.goilawn.com/GIE.

If you’ve already used your free trial and would like to take our new tools for a spin, call us at 800-270-6782 or send us an email at sales@gisdynamics.com, and we can tell you about what’s new and get you back up and running.

Thanks For Reading ~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave team.

 

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Go iLawn? It’s Just Like… https://goitalk.com/go-ilawn-its-just-like/ https://goitalk.com/go-ilawn-its-just-like/#respond Thu, 04 Oct 2018 16:44:44 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6459 We’re gearing up for GIE 2018, so come to Louisville on October 17-19th and try New Go iLawn yourself in Booth #9055.

GIE is one place we meet people who don’t know about Go iLawn. And when we tell them what it does, we sometimes get the response… “Oh, so it’s ‘just like Google’”

Well… No, no it’s not.

I get the comparison… but no. We’re not “just like” Google’s mapping tool. This comment begins a conversation that starts with obvious things like picture quality, drawing tools and data preservation and can end up going deep into all the small details.

It’s hard to tell someone face to face in just a minute or so, all the ways Go iLawn gives them more than the basic measuring capability provided by Google or others.

So today we’re publishing this short list that details some big differences:

#1 The Photos:

Go iLawn uses Airplane Photography for high-quality coverage across most of North America, and our photos are taken in the winter when tree canopies are reduced. As far as we can tell, Google’s images are always taken from a satellite, and they often seem to include trees with full leaf canopies, so you can’t really see the surface beneath.

This is the easiest difference to show. Try it for yourself:

Check out the picture above, then compare it to the same spot on any provider you might use (Google or any other). Here’s the coordinates:  37.572432, -84.291808 . Paste those numbers into your search bar and see what you they show you.

The photos will show a big campus green at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The green is dotted with mature deciduous trees and crossed by paved walkways that you can see clearly with Go iLawn.

Go iLawn lets you see the trees, but you can also see THROUGH the trees to view and measure the surfaces below. Let us know in the comments if you get anything like this with ANY other tool!

#2 The Tools:

Go iLawn’s Drawing Tools, Groups, and Data Preservation are powerful tools to help turn the Pictures you look at into Data you use to build a Systems-Driven company. We don’t know of ANY other system that gives you this power to build a data-based model of your jobs.

  • Use our Drawing Tools to measure, sort, count, categorize, and differentiate the parts of your job-site.
    • Our tools let you measure areas, distances and counts, and our labeling tool puts text onto the screen for making notes about the photo, the job or the client.
  • Our Groups give you the ability to segment measurements into types.
    • Groups can designate whatever is meaningful to how you bid the job.
    • Create custom groups for how you quote work. Group by:
      • The kind of surface
      • Equipment you’ll use
      • Crews doing the job
      • The order of completion
      • …or anything else that makes sense to you
    • Each group has unique colors and patterns, to reveal job details at a glance.
  • Go iLawn’s Data Preservation keeps your work safe, with convenient ways to save and export your data.
    • Every location is automatically saved as a project
    • Projects are auto-saved every time you modify them
    • Your work is always available and always up to date
    • You can export photos of your job-sites and spreadsheets of your measurements
    • You can share your work with customers and crews
    • You can integrate your measurements with an estimating program, your CRMs, ERPs or other software

#3 The Support:

Go iLawn is backed by professionals with deep experience in running and supporting service industry businesses. We’ll train you how to use it, work with you to resolve any issue you have, and basically provide detailed personal support any time you call us at 1-(800) 270-6782 during normal business hours or email us at support@gisdynamics.com

#4 The Overall Effect

There are a host of other, small benefits to using a system that was designed for your service industry businesses over a general purpose tool designed for everyone. Here’s a quick bullet list of some other things worth noting:

  1. More Accurate – Go iLawn’s closer zoom and higher resolution means the measurements you make are more granular and have less margin of error.
  2. More Efficient – Go iLawn is built for professionals, not hobbyists. Speed and efficiency were considered throughout the design process, so you’ll get more done faster.
  3. More Views – Go iLawn offers multiple images of the job-site. Many locations have 11 different views to choose from, so you can see from all angles and at different times.
  4. More Consistency – With Go iLawn, you can set up custom groups, so your categories and color coding get applied to every site you measure, every time you use it.
  5. More Designations – Go iLawn allows you to name each site, each group, and each measurement, to give meaningful tags that help everyone understand the job.

The Bottom Line:

Go iLawn offers unique capabilities that aren’t available in ANY other solution. These abilities are great on their own, and they can be even more powerful when used in conjunction with other tools like general purpose search engines, other mapping tools, and traditional site visits.

Go iLawn gives you something you don’t get anywhere else because of the unique way it combines mapping, drawing, displaying, and saving capabilities.

So don’t be tempted to make a comparison that only looks at part of the picture.

Try It:

But don’t just take our word for it. Try Go iLawn for yourself and see what a difference it can make for your business.

Visit Go iLawn to request your free Trial.

Or try Go iPave, our software designed for Asphalt Maintenance pros.

Thanks ~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave team.

 

 

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5 Reasons to Try NEW Go iLawn and Go iPave https://goitalk.com/5-reasons-to-try-new-go-ilawn/ https://goitalk.com/5-reasons-to-try-new-go-ilawn/#respond Fri, 21 Sep 2018 16:51:20 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6437 It has been almost a year since we introduced our new Go iLawn software, and every week we still get calls from longtime customers who ask us the same question… Why did you change it?

They liked our Classic software. It worked for them. They didn’t see a need to change. And they aren’t always happy… Until they try it.

We get it. It’s human nature not to love change. People prefer to stick with something they know rather than doing something new.

But there are lots of reasons why the New Go iLawn is our best software yet. Here are just a few reasons to Try Go iLawn or Try Go iPave Today:

  1. No More Classic – Our Classic software was written in Adobe Flash, a once-popular multimedia program that has lost industry support. We needed to create a replacement before it simply stopped working.
  1. Try if for Free – There is literally no risk to trying our software. You just need an email address. We don’t ask for money or credit card numbers unless you decide to buy.
  1. Cloud Storage – All your projects are automatically saved to the “My Projects” menu and saved on our servers. You can access them from anywhere and the latest version is always at your fingertips.
  1. Use Any Device – Our new software works on desktops, laptops, tablets… even your iPhone. Measure properties at your desk, in the field, or anywhere – it’s your choice.
  1. Revisit Your Projects for Free – Every project gets saved to the “My Projects” tab, and your subscription allows you to revisit it over and over again to make changes or just to look.

So try the New Go iLawn or the New Go iPave today… You’ll be glad you did.

~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave Team

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Tool Tip – Troubleshooting https://goitalk.com/tool-tip-troubleshooting/ https://goitalk.com/tool-tip-troubleshooting/#respond Thu, 06 Sep 2018 17:19:31 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6424 Having trouble and looking for some direction? Since the introduction of our new software, we’ve found some tricks you can use if the system doesn’t seem to be working at its best. You can always call or email us for tech support, but to help yourself, try these things first:

General Purpose:

Check Your Browser.

While New Go iLawn/Go iPave works on virtually every hardware and browser combination, specific combinations may react differently. Our first troubleshooting recommendation is simply to close out your current session and try logging in on a different browser.

So far, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 browser is the most-likely to cause errors. Although IE 11 works just fine in most cases, we still recommend using any other browser to avoid potential errors.

Refresh / Reload / Reboot.

If the system ever starts to behave strangely in a hardware/browser combination you’ve used successfully in the past, reload the page. With auto-saving and unlimited access to existing projects, there’s no risk to simply hitting the refresh on your browser to re-set it.

Reloading the page will re-set your login, which can clear up any error conditions and return you to default settings. And if this doesn’t help, you can also do a hard reboot by closing down your computer, re-powering and re-opening our software in a new browser window.

Specific Issues – And How To Resolve Them:

Excessive Wait Times or Lags.

This is the primary issue we’ve seen with IE 11; an excessive delay, especially when editing groups or creating labels. If you experience excessive wait times, check to make sure you’re not using IE 11, and try a different browser.

Another cause of excessive wait time has been seen with certain peripheral hardware sets. Specifically wireless mouse/keyboard sets which share a single USB dongle. Try a different keyboard and see if your lag problems persist.

My Drawings Disappeared!

You may have inadvertently hidden one or all of your groups. The fastest way to fix it is to click the “Hide All” button at the top of the groups list. It then becomes the “Show All” button. Click it again, and all your drawings will appear on the screen.

And if you’re creating drawings and they disappear as soon as you complete them, you may be drawing in a hidden group. Unhide the group, and your drawing(s) will appear.

I’m Stuck. It Won’t…

Look to the bottom left of the property image for a grey text box. This is the “Drawing Tool Tips” dialog, and it offers instructions and commands that can help you get back to the default state. Look for a “Stop”, “Cancel”, or “Complete” button that will end the current process and get you back to normal operation.

“All Changes Saved”

In the extreme bottom left of your window, our software displays the message “All Changes Saved” in small, grey text. When you complete a drawing, it will briefly flash a “Saving” message.

If this message stays on “Saving” for an extended period of time, it may indicate that your internet connection lapsed. Once you become disconnected from our server, we can’t continue to auto-save your work until a new session is started. Discontinue drawing until you can reconnect to our server by refreshing or logging in.

Contact Us:

If you still have problems, you can always email us at sales@gisdynamics.com to ask tech support questions.

 

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Tool Tip – Tags and The Sidebar https://goitalk.com/tool-tip-tags-and-the-sidebar/ https://goitalk.com/tool-tip-tags-and-the-sidebar/#respond Fri, 24 Aug 2018 19:36:53 +0000 https://goitalk.com/?p=6414 The Sidebar in the New Go iLawn / Go iPave includes your address, groups and print & save options. But did you know it also allows you to open a hidden set of project management tools we call the Project Tags Menu?

To access it, open your project and click the + sign next to the “Project Tags & Options” (at top left, below our logo).

The Project Tags Menu

In this menu, (pictured) you can add tags to your projects to empower our tag-based project management system.

These tags control user access, sorting and visibility of your projects in the My Projects Screen. Here’s how it works:

Our Default Tags…

Every project starts with at least one tag: the Username Tag of the user who created it. (Your username is the part of your login email that comes before the @ sign). Projects that match to an identified parcel address also get Location Tags that list the State, County, City, and Zip Code.

… For Sharing

If you have a single-user “Pro” account the Username Tag may not mean much, but in multi-user, “Team”, “Group”, “Enterprise”, and custom accounts, it allows you to share access to your project with other users.

Regular “User” accounts in Go iLawn/Go iPave (Not “Admin” or “Manager” roles) normally have limited access, to only the projects they create. But you can share your projects with other users. To do so, just “Tag” the project with their Username using the “Add a Tag” option. Now it will appear in their projects list, and they have access to open and edit it.

… For Sorting

The Location Tags are great for sorting jobs by state, town, county, or zipcode. From the My Projects screen, just  use the “search tags” box at upper left to find a list of projects that share a tag.

Your Custom Tags:

We also recommend using your own tagging system to help sort jobs by characteristics that are meaningful to you. You can search and sort via your custom tags, just like the location tags above. How you use them is really up to you.

Here are some tagging ideas:

  • Tag by Branch – To designate your branch location that serves the property
  • Tag by Customer – To group all the jobs you do for a specific company or property manager
  • Tag by Salesperson – To allow your account managers to see their jobs grouped together
  • Tag by Service – To differentiate maintenance from design-build or year-round from seasonal jobs or etc…
  • Tag by Crew or Crew Type – To sort by the operations team executing work on-site
  • Tag by Won/Lost – To sort by whether your bid was accepted or not
  • Tag by Time – To sort your jobs by the day, week, month, or year you bid, won, or performed them

We give you options for naming, tagging and sorting your projects, and how you use them is really up to you.

How do you use Tags? Let us know in the comments!

Happy Tagging! ~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave Team

For more tool tips, see our main Tool Tips Page

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