PlumbingBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Plumbing Billing Reports: What to Look At Every Week and Every Month

Plenty of plumbing shop owners run the business on feel. They know when it is busy and when it is slow, roughly who owes them money, and about what came in last month. That works until it does not: a big customer stops paying, a plan quietly stops renewing, or a slow month turns out to be a billing backlog. A few minutes with the right numbers each week replaces guessing with knowing.

Reports Support the Review

The checklist in The Plumbing Billing Month-End Review: A One-Hour Checklist leans on billing reports. This article is about which numbers to look at, how often, and what to do about them.

The Three Numbers That Matter Most

PlumbingBossPro's billing reports show what was invoiced, what was paid and what is still open. For a small plumbing company, those three answer most of the important questions:

• Invoiced. How much work did we do and bill? This is your activity.
• Paid. How much money actually came in? This is your cash.
• Open. How much is still owed? This is money you earned but do not have yet.

When invoiced is high and paid is low, you have a collections problem, not a sales problem. When both are low, you have a slow period. When open keeps growing month after month, something in your follow-up is not working.

Every Week: Ten Minutes

Once a week, look at:

• Open invoices from the past week. Any declined cards? Any customer questions that need an answer?
• Old open invoices. Anything that has been open a long time should get a personal follow-up, not just another automatic reminder.
• What was paid. A quick sense of whether cash is coming in at the pace you expect.

Ten minutes on a Monday morning catches problems while they are small. A declined card from three days ago is easy to fix. One from three months ago is a collections case.

Every Month: Twenty Minutes

At month-end, step back:

• Totals compared to last month. Invoiced, paid and open. Is the trend going the right way?
• Monthly accounts. Did every property manager and restaurant statement go out and get paid?
• Kinds of work. If your service list names are consistent, you can see what kinds of jobs brought in the money: service calls, drain work, water heaters, plan visits.
• The biggest open balances. Who owes the most, and what is the plan to collect?

Clean Data Makes Useful Reports

Reports are only as good as what goes into them. A few habits make PlumbingBossPro's reports far more useful:

• Consistent service names. If every tech bills drain cleaning under the same service, you can see drain work at a glance. If one bills “drain,” another “snake” and another “misc,” you cannot. The line-item approach in Plumbing Invoice Line Items Customers Understand: Service Call, Labor, Parts and Fixtures helps here.
• Jobs marked complete. Work never completed never gets invoiced, and never shows up.
• Tags and custom fields on clients. Tagging property managers, restaurants and plan customers lets you think about each group separately.

What to Do With What You See

Numbers are only worth looking at if they lead to action. Some common patterns:

• Open balance growing: tighten past-due follow-up and push for more cards on file.
• Lots of declined cards: remind plan customers to update cards in the customer app before visits.
• Water heater work strong, plan sign-ups weak: have techs offer the yearly flush plan after every install.
• One monthly account always late: confirm the billing contact and talk to the manager.

Write down the one action you took after each review. Next week, check whether it worked before adding anything new.

Resist the urge to track everything. A small shop that reliably checks three numbers every week is in far better shape than one that builds a giant spreadsheet once and never opens it again. Start with invoiced, paid and open, and add more only when a real question comes up that those three cannot answer. Consistency matters more than detail, and a routine you keep beats a dashboard you ignore.

Share the Right Numbers

Office user roles let you decide who sees what. Your office manager might run the weekly review while the owner looks at the monthly totals. Your accountant will want certain reports at tax time; ask them which, and pull them the same way each time.

For how reports fit with the rest of plumbing billing, see the PlumbingBossPro plumbing invoicing software page.