Protect Your Profit with Pictures of the Project

When your estimator visited Parking Lot C last fall, she bid the project based on some minor cracks and weathering. Your company won the bid to seal a few cracks, sealcoat the whole thing, re-stripe and repaint the car stops. Now your crew has arrived with materials and equipment to find multiple sunken birdbaths, numerous broken car stops, leaning bollards, and something that looks like an herb garden growing out of the nearest ADA-compliant parking stall.

How does your foreman tell the property owner that this isn’t the same project any longer? Hopefully, everything was documented with photographs. Take pictures when you estimate. Take pictures of the “Notice to Residents” that you post a week prior to your arrival for work. Take pictures of the pavement when you arrive to do the work.

Take pictures when your laborer notices something odd at the edge of the covered parking area. Take pictures of the clean, pretty edge you leave along the curb and gutter. Take pictures of the caution tape you extend between safety cones keeping pedestrians from walking across the sealant.

You get the idea.

Your foreman should have a tablet or phone connected to the AI or other data-collecting system you use for billing, so all the image-collecting is seamless and easy. With the abundance of camera phones and drones these days, there’s no excuse for missing evidence to help you prove the condition of a pavement at any point in the paving or pavement maintenance process. Use these copiously to document your projects and retain the pictures, along with all the records you keep. Records like truck delivery tickets, temperature recordings, compaction/density readings, and so on.

If you’re attending CONEXPO-CON/AGG next week, make sure you watch your email for the daily updates we’ll be sending out—to this email address—with updates and information about the technologies and offerings exhibitors will have for asphalt contractors. The vendors who make paving, production, sealcoating and striping (and documentation of it all) easier will be there, and we’ll send the news to you.

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