In every business or to be more specific, a service business, there are many roles that different workers need to play in order for that business to run successfully. One can be technical, PR, Managerial, Sales, Marketing or In house Tech Support and a lot more. However, What I’d like to focus on today, is the aspect of Billing when the Tech from a service business finishes the repair, upgrade, or scheduled maintenance.
In a small business, especially one that deals with services, there aren’t too many workers who do a specific task. Rather, there may be 1-10 workers all sharing tasks such as technical and sales or tech support with phone support, and for the even smaller company, billing and tech support.
Being a small service company, the aspect of Billing and more sophisticated Invoicing and scheduling usually gets left behind for the more important role, which would usually be the actual Service itself.
So, instead of focusing one’s energy in Sales, Billing and Invoicing, it is focused more on the job at hand, which is to get the task taken care of so the customer is happy, and that you get paid for the work.
However, after the job is done, what’s next?
How do we go about billing the customer in an efficient way which will keep the amount of money owed and the money paid organized?
Or, appointments for the next visit, and how much inventory you have for the next job, or even how much to pay your workers, and how much you paid previously. Or more importantly, You’d like to keep track of how much money you are actually making a the end of the month after paying for the parts, and your workers.
Some people use simple spreadsheets, and some just use pen and paper. Other bigger businesses may use Quick Books or Peach Tree or other account software. But even so, they face the issue of it being specific enough to handle a service business with workers and Invoicing for a service type of environment. Another issue which service businesses face is the problem of keeping track of all the work being done off site by another tech, and reporting exactly what had been done and how long it took. Traditionally, the Tech would either have to call the Service center to tell them what had been worked on and exactly how long it took, then the Invoice would have to be created, then would have to be emailed or mailed to the client.
The question would then be, when will the payment be made by the customer? And how?