Get paid for the work while you still remember doing it.
Invoicing is a month-end marathon. Jobs completed on the third get billed on the thirtieth. Receivables past sixty days are nobody's job to chase, and you cannot tell what has been paid without opening the bank.
Where the day goes now
- Finished jobs sit for weeks waiting to be invoiced, which means you are financing the customer for free.
- Some completed work is never billed at all, because the list of what is done and the list of what is invoiced are different lists.
- Aging is a report you run when cash is tight, not a list you work every Monday.
- Payments are recorded in the accounting package and never against the invoice, so the customer says they paid and you cannot say otherwise.
What Billing changes
- Billing Queue. Every completed job lands here until it is invoiced. The list of done work and the list of billed work become one list.
- Create Invoice from the job. Customer, building, PO and the line items of the work carried over, with the payment term setting the due date.
- Payments. Recorded against the invoice they settle, with a running ledger, so the balance is always the truth.
- AR Aging. Who owes what and for how long, in buckets, sorted so Monday's calls make themselves.
The Billing Queue
A job enters the queue when it is marked complete and has not yet been put on an invoice. Before invoicing, the review screen shows the time logged on the job, its notes, any field requests, and for inspections the deficiencies found, so the invoice is written with the whole visit in view. One invoice can bundle several jobs for the same customer.
Invoices
An invoice carries the customer, number, date, due date, subtotal, tax, total, amount paid and balance, and moves through Draft, Sent, Partially Paid, Paid and Void. Lines come from the job's service items; a line covered by the customer's contract is shown on the invoice at no charge, and a contract-priced line shows the agreed price. Tax is a rate per line from the company's tax table.
The invoice is rendered from the company's own Word template, so it carries your logo and terms, and is sent by email as a link or an attachment. The customer can open it from the link or in the customer portal.
Voiding keeps the invoice on record with a zero balance; an invoice that has been paid against cannot be voided. An overpayment becomes a customer credit that can be applied to a later invoice.
Payments and online payment
Payments are recorded by method with a reference number, and every application writes a ledger entry with the running balance. For online payment the company connects its own Stripe account; the customer pays by card from the invoice link or the portal, and the payment posts to the invoice. A company that runs on Square instead has its invoices mirrored to Square when they leave Draft and the Square payments pulled back, with a daily reconcile.
QuickBooks
With QuickBooks Online connected, invoices are pushed to QuickBooks when they are issued, creating the QuickBooks customer the first time. Payments go both ways: a payment recorded in InspectSync, including an online card payment, is pushed to QuickBooks, and a payment entered in QuickBooks is pulled back onto the InspectSync invoice. A daily reconcile catches anything that drifted. [CONTENT NEEDED: confirm the QuickBooks connection is enabled for customer accounts and state whether QuickBooks Desktop is supported.]
AR Aging and credit hold
AR Aging groups open invoices into Current, 1 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90 and over 90 days past due, with a summary, the detail behind each bucket, and collection notes kept per invoice. A customer whose amount due passes its credit limit, or whose overdue balance passes its overdue limit, is shown on credit hold; a site billed through a national account is judged on the account's terms instead.
National accounts and contracts
A job on a national-account building is invoiced to the account's bill-to, not to the site, and the account's billing summary shows the whole portfolio. A contract with a recurring fee generates its own draft invoice each period, monthly through every two years, so subscription-style agreements bill themselves.
Bottom line
Nothing finished goes unbilled, and the days between the work and the money shrink. Two weeks off collections on a million-dollar year is roughly forty thousand dollars of cash in the account.
Inside this module
- Dashboard
- Billing Queue, All Invoices, Create Invoice
- All Payments, AR Aging