The tradie app that takes the time and hassle out of invoicing
When you spend most of your day on-site, you end up doing your invoicing in the evenings and on weekends. Tracking down timesheets or ever-changing supplier pricelists can make invoicing take a really, really long time. It’s not surprising that sometimes you leave them for a few weeks or even months.
When Jonathan Clark joined his Dad’s business Watts Up Electrical that’s how things were working.
“He’d be doing invoicing in the evenings and had jobs that were six months old and hadn’t been invoiced. The cash flow was ok, but it needed to increase if we wanted to be more stable.”
The problem with that? The longer you leave your invoices, the longer it takes for you to get paid. And even worse, if you wait too long, you could end up forgetting to add in small costs or miscalculate hours. All that adds up to lost money, and less cash in the bank.
“If you’re doing things manually, you have to go back through emails, and get dates, and look at what everyone’s bought, and the time they’ve spent. It’s so time-consuming and draining, that sometimes you just say, ‘screw it’, invoice blind and hope that you’ve allowed for everything,” says Jonathan.
Getting invoices out faster is the key. Tradify makes invoicing fast and painless. In fact, Tradify is so easy, you don’t even have to be in the office to do your invoicing. Here’s how it works:
Invoicing goes from hours to minutes
In Tradify’s mobile app, you can track your time and allocate costs to a job as you go. If you spot an error, you can quickly make adjustments, giving you confidence that you’ve included all of your time and materials. You can also pre-load (and update) supplier price lists, pricing levels for different customers, and your hourly billing rate, and add these to your invoice using dropdown menus – no more do-overs or double-checking. Not sure what your billable rate should be? Check out our billable rate calculator for trade businesses.
“When suppliers send me an update, I upload it, and I always have an accurate listing. It means I also know exactly what I’ve paid for something. That saves so much time,” Jonathan says. “I can check the notes and add anything, instead of running around clarifying things.”
Once a job is finished, it can take a matter of moments to send off an invoice, giving your client no excuse but to pay you on time. “It’s just a click, collate time and materials and send it out,” Jonathan explains. “Then I can be out there getting more work, so we have that continuity.”
Bill for part of a job – or heaps of jobs at once
Depending on the job and the customer, you might want to invoice for a deposit or a progress payment. Then it’s as simple as converting the quote into an invoice and flicking it out.
This is especially useful for managing your cash flow during those larger jobs which might take months to complete.
If you’re managing lots of little jobs, Tradify can help there too.
For any regular service or maintenance jobs where the costs don’t change from month to month, you don’t waste time invoicing each month individually.
Instead, you can generate a billing run in Tradify to create a bulk lot of invoices – we’re talking 20 invoices in a minute! You can either create one invoice with multiple jobs for a single customer or bulk invoice for multiple jobs across lots of different customers. This function will save you huge amounts of time, so you don’t have to work over the weekend – good news.
Know when to chase late payments
Blink and before you know it, it’s been a month, and your invoices are 30 days overdue – that’s a month’s worth of credit you’re giving your customers, free!
Invoicing through Tradify gives you what we call x-ray vision. This new feature lets you track and view the status of all your invoices. In other words, you can see if clients have received your invoices and whether they’ve opened them – helping you decide when and how to follow up. Even better, Tradify sends some of those payment reminders for you. This will help you get paid more quickly and improve your cash flow.
The quicker you invoice, the quicker you get paid
We know you didn’t start your trades business to spend your evenings and weekends doing admin work and chasing invoices. Whether you’ve been in business five minutes or five decades, if you’re not invoicing on time, chances are your cash flow is suffering and you need to add Tradify to your tool belt.
Tradify has multiple invoicing options, and because it works on any Android or Apple device, you can sort your invoices from your truck, while on lunch – even while on the phone to a customer. No fancy tricks or complicated dashboards, just a simple tool that knows what tradies need.
