PlumbingBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Moving Plumbing Billing Off Paper Invoices and the Carbon Pad

The carbon pad has been a plumber's billing system for generations. Write the work, write the price, tear off the customer copy, keep the yellow one. It is simple and it never needs charging. It also gets wet, gets lost under the seat, depends on someone typing it up later, and leaves you with no idea who still owes you money unless you dig through a box.

Moving off paper is less work than most shops expect. Here is a plan that does it without disrupting a single day of jobs.

Small Shops Go First

Owner-operators, as covered in Invoicing as an Owner-Operator Plumber: Billing From the Van Between Calls, often make the switch in a weekend. A shop with a few vans and an office person takes a bit longer, but the steps are the same.

Step 1: Bring In Your Customers

Start with your customer list, wherever it lives: a spreadsheet, an old program's export, a contacts list. Clean up obvious duplicates, then bring it into PlumbingBossPro with a CSV import. Addresses are placed on the map automatically.

Property managers and landlords come in as one client with many addresses. You do not need every detail on day one. Names, addresses, phone numbers and emails are enough to start. Equipment on each house can be filled in as techs visit.

Step 2: Write Your Service List

Your carbon pads already tell you what you sell. Go through a stack of old invoices and list the services that show up most: service call, drain cleaning, main line clearing, faucet repair, toilet repair, disposal replacement, water heater replacement, leak repair and so on. Give each one a clear name and your price.

Add after-hours and weekend charges, haul-away and anything else you bill separately. This list becomes every estimate and invoice from now on. The thinking behind clear names is in Plumbing Invoice Line Items Customers Understand: Service Call, Labor, Parts and Fixtures.

Step 3: Set Up Sales Tax and Billing Types

Set up sales tax the way your accountant says applies to you. Then mark your monthly accounts — property managers, landlords and restaurants — as Monthly, so they get one statement covering every address instead of per-job invoices.

Set up recurring work too: yearly flushes at 365 days, restaurant jetting at 14 or 30, and any softener or backflow schedules. From now on, those visits come due on the Waiting List on their own.

Step 4: Put the Tech App on Phones

Add each employee with a personal PIN and assign them to a van. The tech app runs in the browser on iPhone and Android and installs to the home screen. No app store, no special devices. Most techs pick it up on one or two jobs: navigate, read the card, Start, photos, Complete.

Show them the one thing that replaces the carbon pad: Complete creates the invoice.

Step 5: Pick a Cutover Day

Choose a day, ideally the start of a week. From that day on:

• Every new job is scheduled in PlumbingBossPro.
• Every completed job is invoiced by tapping Complete.
• The carbon pads come out of the vans.

Old paper invoices that are still unpaid can be finished the old way. You do not need to retype the past. Within a month or two, nearly every open invoice will be in the new system.

Step 6: Start Collecting Cards

From the cutover day, ask every new booking for a card on file. Put the sign-up form on your website. Have techs mention the customer app at the end of visits, where customers can add a card, see invoices and pay online. Cards on file are what turn the switch from “digital paperwork” into money arriving faster.

Expect a few bumps in the first week. A tech forgets to tap Complete, a customer asks why the invoice looks different, a service name needs rewording. Fix them as they come up and keep going. By the second or third week, most shops find that nobody wants the carbon pads back, and the office has more time for answering customers and booking work. Keep one person in charge of fielding questions that first week so the answers stay consistent.

What Changes in the First Month

• Nobody types up invoices at night.
• The office knows which jobs are done and billed without waiting for paper to come back.
• Past-due follow-up runs on its own.
• The month-end review takes an hour, not a weekend.

Choosing the right tool for the switch is the subject of the last article in this series. For the full billing picture, see the PlumbingBossPro plumbing invoicing software page.