Invoicing, and the Screen That Tells You Who To Chase

Invoicing is the least interesting thing any of these platforms do, and they all do it. Collections is where the money actually is, and it is the part most construction software leaves you to solve with a PDF export and a good memory.

What you actually do

1. 1
   Bill the queued jobThe office sends the invoice. It is built from the job, so there is nothing to assemble.
2. 2
   Open the follow-up listIt is already ranked. The top of it is where the money is, not where the oldest invoice is.
3. 3
   Send the reminder, or make the callThe wording is written and ready. You read it, then it goes from your own mailbox.
4. 4
   Write down what they saidA promised date, a dispute, or a note from the phone call. That answer drives what happens next.
5. 5
   Record the paymentPart of it or all of it. A partly paid invoice keeps chasing the balance, not the original number.

The invoice

It is generated from the job: the same number, the same scope, the same rows, plus any change orders that were approved and applied. Nothing on it was typed a second time, so there is nothing on it to get wrong.

It prints on your letterhead with your terms and your remittance details. Send it from your own mailbox, so it lands in your Sent folder and replies come back to you, or send it through the platform under your company name if you have not set that up yet.

A company billing under two names can map a trade to each one. The concrete side quotes and invoices as one company and the insulation side as the other, end to end, with the right bank details on each. For a lot of shops that normally means keeping two sets of templates and remembering which is which.

The collections worklist

This is the screen worth judging a platform on.

It ranks your receivables by dollars at risk (the balance multiplied by how late it is) instead of oldest first. That order matters more than it sounds. A morning spent on a $400 invoice ninety days late while a $90,000 one sits at forty days collects nothing, and oldest-first is exactly the order that sends you there. The small ancient ones are at the top of every aging report ever printed.

Look at the "never chased" figure the first time you open this. In most companies it is the largest number on the page, and no aging report has ever shown it, because an aging report knows how old an invoice is and knows nothing about what anybody did about it. Two invoices at sixty days, one chased five times and one never touched, are the same row on every aging report and need completely opposite things from you.

What the customer said

When you chase somebody, you get an answer, and the answer decides what happens next.

• A promise to pay on the 15th pauses the reminders until the 15th goes by.
• A dispute stops them and does not restart on its own, because nothing in software knows when an argument is over. A person decides that.
• A promise whose date passed with no money holds nothing at all. It escalates, and it is the strongest signal in the book: somebody who told you a date and missed it has told you something.

Reminders climb a ladder that gets firmer and then ends. Every one is claimed before it is written, so two people working the same list at the same time cannot email the same builder twice for the same money. That is the sort of mistake that costs you a relationship, not just an afternoon.

And nothing goes out unless somebody has read it. There is an autopilot, it is off, and turning it on takes an owner typing a word and agreeing to limits: what it may chase, how large an invoice it may touch on its own, what hours it may send in. An invoice with nobody to email pauses for a person rather than guessing at an address.

Every screen on this page is the software running, captured from a demo workspace. The builders, addresses and contacts in it are invented; the plan is one we drew. More at Opulence Built.