Short answer. You stop retyping work orders into your invoicing by linking the hours, materials and extra work on the work order directly to the project and invoice, so they are entered only once. Work order apps (such as Werkbriefje, AFAS or Werkbon.nl) do this for the standard chain. If you run Exact, Excel and a separate planning side by side, a custom integration is often needed.
The engineer is done, the work order is filled in. And then the real work begins: someone at the office retypes the hours and the materials into the invoicing.
That is ten minutes per order. Multiply that by your number of jobs per week, and you understand why it is the most expensive ten minutes of your day.
Why retyping costs money
It is not just the time. Every time you retype a work order, something can go wrong: a wrong number of hours, a forgotten material line. And the extra work the engineer quickly did on the side but did not record clearly, you often do not invoice at all.
That last one is the biggest leak. Not what you type wrong, but what you forget to invoice.
Record hours on the road, not from memory in the evening
The source of the error is often at the start. An engineer who fills in his hours from memory in the evening is less accurate than an engineer who logs them on site.
Work order apps solve this: hours, materials, photos and customer approval on the phone, at the moment itself. That saves retyping and discussion afterwards.
From work order to invoice in one chain
The gain is in the link. Logged hours and materials end up in the project administration, and from there you turn them into an invoice with a few clicks, instead of entering everything again.
This is exactly what standard work order software does well, provided your entire process fits into it. Many installation and construction companies, however, have Exact for their bookkeeping, their own planning in Excel and a calculation tool alongside it. In that case the standard app does not connect automatically with what you already use, and the retyping starts again somewhere else.
When a custom integration pays off
The goal is control over your invoicing and your margin, with less manual work. That is why I first go through your chain, because some steps have just grown that way and can be done smarter or removed. What remains, linking your work order to your existing bookkeeping, planning and invoicing so an order is entered only once and extra work always carries through, I build. This has to be sorted out one way or another. The question is whether it cannot be done smarter today than by hand.
Frequently asked questions
How do I link work orders to my invoicing?
By linking the hours, materials and extra work on the work order to the project, so you can turn it into an invoice with a few clicks. Work order apps do this for their own chain; linking to an existing package such as Exact sometimes requires custom work.
How do engineers record their hours on the road?
With a work order app on their phone, in which they log hours, materials, photos and customer approval on site. That is more accurate than from memory in the evening and saves retyping at the office.
How do I avoid forgetting to invoice extra work?
By recording extra work on the work order at the moment itself and letting it carry through to the invoice automatically. Extra work that exists only verbally or in a quick message is the kind that most often disappears from your invoicing.
Further reading
- Your margin leaks away between the work order and the invoice
- You only find out at the post-calculation what a job really cost
I am Ricardo Theijs of RNT Projects. With a background in enterprise process management, I build integrations that take the manual work out of your chain. I tell you honestly when a standard package is enough.
Running into this yourself?
I review your process and build the solution where a standard package falls short. Remote, with visible results in two weeks.
Let's talk