The idea that invoicing can be a major differentiator between one HVAC contractor and their competition might seem counterintuitive. After all, each and every contractor in the game uses an HVAC service order invoice of some kind .
For those who do, having a blank invoice template is useful in providing you with consistent formatting and a professional design. It allows you to ensure that techs collect the necessary information in the field to handle billing and collection.
With that said, an invoice template alone can only go so far, and it doesn’t solve the challenges involved in the invoicing process . For example, if you print copies of a template to be used by techs in the field, you’ll continue to deal with things like:
And if you try to manage them digitally, using a PDF is difficult to scale — and many of the same issues continue to apply.
To solve these issues, HVAC contractors who want to improve their ability to manage invoicing are looking to field service management software (FSM) platforms like ServiceTitan to optimize their process.
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In this article, we’ll explain how a best-in-class field service software like ServiceTitan can help contractors take the next steps, making invoicing a driving force for growth, efficiency, and revenue generation — rather than a source of often-costly hiccups.
Curious about how ServiceTitan can allow you to make the most of our invoice template? Schedule a call to learn more about how our software can help realize the full potential of your business.
If you’d like to download and use our PDF invoice template (shown below), you can click here to download it free.
Our invoice form includes:
Alternatively, we’ve also created a free, interactive web tool for you to easily create invoices right through our website:
Our invoice generator includes the same fields as our PDF template, but it allows techs to create an invoice directly from the field, and easily save and email it to customers or office staff from their mobile device.
As long as they have online access, our invoice generator is a useful tool that can take you part of the way towards an improved invoicing process.
However, as you may already know, the challenges involved in invoicing are many. Below, we’ll take a deeper look at the challenges we’ve sought to solve for HVAC businesses.
At its most basic level, an invoice should provide proof of work completed. This sounds so simple — even obvious — that it’s easy to assume that nothing could go wrong. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, particularly for HVAC companies that handle invoicing with pen and paper, and even for those who rely on a less comprehensive FSM system.
In business, as in life, it’s often the failure of things that seem most basic that can cause the biggest problems. Where invoices are concerned, these issues tend to fall into three broad categories.
The perils of pen-and-paper record keeping will be familiar to most HVAC contractors. Quickly written forms from service techs are often difficult or impossible to understand.
Cash payments and credit card numbers go missing. Paperwork gets lost, damaged, or stained with coffee, dirt, and grease. Duplicates go missing and Excel files or Google Docs get lost in translation.
When the paperwork in question is an invoice, the results can be costly.
Having just spent $10,000 or more, a customer might end up holding an invoice with serial and model numbers that they can barely read. In the not unlikely event that office or warehouse employees had difficulty making sense of their tech’s order forms, the invoice might not match the original estimate, indicating, for example, that a Bryant 18 Seer was installed, rather than the Carrier 20 Seer that was agreed upon.
In that case, their rebate information is probably wrong, too. Depending on if and when they notice the mistake, the customer might be out of luck when it comes to qualifying for a rebate or manufacturer’s warranty.
Naturally, none of this is good for customer relations. A few misfires along these lines can easily cause serious damage to a contractor’s reputation.
Paper invoices, which are often sent or delivered days or weeks after the completion of a job, can also present bill-collection hurdles. It’s not unusual for homeowners to become less inclined to pay promptly once some time has passed since the completion of a job, leading to potential cash flow problems for the contractor, who’s already laid out for labor, equipment, and other expenses.
(By the same token, contractors who provide paper receipts frequently do so after the fact, leaving homeowners who’ve just made very large expenditures with no record of the transaction.)
HVAC contractors who service multiple properties owned by the same landlord often run into trouble with purchase orders, which techs must attach to their invoices, and which are location-specific. For paper-dependent shops, this is another area ripe for human error.
If a tech services three locations for the same customer, for example, but attaches the same P.O. number to all three invoices, two of those invoices aren’t going to get paid.
In some circumstances, the contractor will be forced to write off those unpaid invoices. In the long run, the inability to collect effectively for work completed can constrict a business owner’s ability to borrow money, limiting their capacity to invest in new equipment and technology, and lessening their overall liquidity.
Similarly, an invoice for which a tech neglected to get the requisite signatures — a common symptom in pen-and-paper HVAC shops — can create serious complications.
In worst-case scenarios, customers can take business owners to court, arguing that they weren’t authorized to charge their credit card — or even to perform the work in question.
In less dire circumstances, an HVAC contractor might get dinged with repeated chargebacks, causing their credit card fees to rise.
To address some of the problems described above, many HVAC contractors implement policies such as having their techs return to the office, where a manager can oversee the creation of their invoice before the document is mailed or delivered to the customer by hand at a later date.
In other cases, the tech will go out to their truck and relay the details of the job back to the office by phone. Then they’ll wait for a call back from someone with the authority to sign-off on an invoice, before finally delivering it to the customer.
These types of policies tend to be slower and less efficient than is ideal.
In the latter case, HVAC contractors often find that they’re adding 30 to 45 minutes to every job, eating up tons of time that their employees could otherwise be performing or selling additional jobs.
To make matters worse, service businesses that use this kind of multi-step invoicing process open themselves up to opportunities for costly errors.
Every time customer information is relayed from one employee to another or from one location to another — whether it be measurements, model numbers, credit card details — is a chance for something to get lost or inaccurately transcribed.
We’ve written previously about accounting best practices for service companies using a field service management platform. At ServiceTitan, we provide our users with a seamless QuickBooks integration, which facilitates the automated upload of all relevant financial data in real time.
Our QuickBooks integration has the advantage of providing contractors with a system that operates according to generally accepted accounting principles. Business owners can rest easy knowing that in the event of an audit, or if at some point they want to sell their business, their books will be in order. Virtually every trained bookkeeper can run a QuickBooks account, so it’s easy to rotate staff as necessary.
Many HVAC contractors that still do the vast majority of their business with pen and paper often use QuickBooks to handle their accounting needs. What this means in practice, though, is that office employees spend a tremendous amount of time manually entering information from handwritten invoices into their company’s QuickBooks account. It’s time that could be better spent on more profitable tasks — work that would be entirely unnecessary at a company using ServiceTitan.
Given how frequently handwritten paperwork goes missing, gets damaged, or is flawed or illegible to begin with, the arrangement is also extremely precarious, posing a serious risk to the accuracy of a company’s most basic financial documentation and setting the owners up for major fiscal and legal headaches in the future.
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