ElectricalBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Cutting Billing Paperwork in a Small Electrical Shop

Walk into the office of a small electrical shop and you can often see the billing process sitting on the desk: a stack of carbon-copy job tickets, an invoice book, a folder of unpaid bills, envelopes and stamps, and a notepad with a couple of card numbers on it. Every piece of that paper is a step someone has to take by hand, usually after the real work of the day is done.

Paperwork Is Where Speed Gets Lost

The previous guide, How Electricians Get Paid Faster Without Chasing Customers, looked at the gaps between work and payment. Most of those gaps are made of paperwork. Remove the paper, and the gaps close on their own.

Here is where billing paperwork usually piles up, and what replaces it in ElectricalBossPro.

The Job Ticket

The paper way: The tech fills out a ticket by hand, often in a hurry, sometimes in the rain. It rides around in the van until someone brings it to the office. The office tries to read it.

The ElectricalBossPro way: The job is on the tech's phone in the tech app, with the services, the equipment saved on the house and the access notes. The tech taps Start, takes before-and-after photos, adds notes, and taps Complete. The office sees the completed job right away. There is no ticket to carry back.

The Invoice

The paper way: Someone copies the ticket into an invoice book or a spreadsheet, looks up prices, figures the tax and totals it.

The ElectricalBossPro way: Tapping Complete creates the invoice from the job, with line items from your service list and sales tax applied from your settings. Nobody copies anything. On bigger jobs, the lines came from the approved estimate, which became the job, so the estimate is never retyped either.

The Envelope

The paper way: Print, fold, stuff, stamp, mail, wait.

The ElectricalBossPro way: Invoices are in the customer app on the customer's phone. Customers with a card on file are charged at completion, and the invoice is their record. Customers without one pay online from the customer app. Property managers and commercial accounts set to Monthly get one statement covering every address, instead of a pile of separate bills.

The Card Number on a Sticky Note

The paper way: The customer reads their card over the phone and someone writes it down, then types it into a terminal later. The note sits on the desk.

The ElectricalBossPro way: Cards are captured through the website sign-up form, added by the customer in the customer app, or added on the client by the office. When a card expires, the customer updates it in the customer app. The office does not need to write card numbers down at all.

The Unpaid Folder

The paper way: Unpaid invoices go in a folder. Once in a while someone flips through it and makes calls.

The ElectricalBossPro way: Past-due follow-up reminds customers about open invoices. The reports show what has been billed and what has been collected. Two-way texting handles the conversations that need a person. The folder becomes a short list on a screen. That is covered in detail in Billing Reports for Electrical Contractors: What Is Paid, What Is Owed and What Came In.

The Renewal Calendar

The paper way: A calendar or spreadsheet of which customers are due for their yearly inspection or generator service, checked when someone remembers.

The ElectricalBossPro way: Plan visits are set by minimum days between visits, such as 365 for a yearly safety inspection or generator maintenance. When a visit comes due, it lands on the Waiting List map, gets scheduled, and is billed when the tech completes it.

What You Get Back

Cutting paperwork is not just tidier. It gives a small shop back hours every week that used to go to copying, mailing, filing and calling. For an owner who does the billing at night, that is evenings back. For a shop with an office manager, it is time that can go to booking more work instead of processing the work already done.

It also makes the shop easier to run when someone is out. When billing lives in the software instead of on one person's desk, anyone with the right office role can see what is happening.

A Desk Without the Stack

The paper in a small electrical shop's office is a map of every manual step in billing. ElectricalBossPro replaces each step: jobs on the phone instead of tickets, invoices from the job instead of copied ones, the customer app instead of envelopes, saved cards instead of sticky notes, and the Waiting List instead of a renewal calendar. To see all of it together, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrical invoicing software page.