ElectricalBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

One Monthly Statement for Every Address: Billing Commercial Electrical Accounts

Ask a commercial account what they want from their electrician and somewhere near the top of the list, right after “show up when you say you will,” is “send me one bill.” A property manager with fifteen jobs across eight addresses does not want fifteen invoices. Their accounting office wants one document a month, clear enough to approve without calling you.

The Problem With Per-Job Invoices

The last article, Office Building Electrical Work: Suites, Floors and the Front Desk in One Record, ended with the question of who pays for what. This one is about how they pay.

Per-job invoices make sense for homeowners. The job is done, the card on file is charged, everybody moves on. For a commercial account they create work on both sides. Your office sends a stream of small invoices. Their office has to match each one to a property, approve it, and pay it. Some get lost. Some get paid twice. Some sit until somebody notices. By the end of the quarter, nobody is sure what is outstanding.

How Monthly Billing Works

In ElectricalBossPro billing is set on the client. Set a property manager, gym, retail chain or restaurant group to Monthly and their jobs stop generating separate bills. Instead, every completed job across every address under that client is gathered onto one statement for the month.

Each line on the statement is labeled with the address where the work was done. The account sees something like:

• “412 Pine, Unit A — GFCI replacement”
• “Store 14, Main St — lighting maintenance visit”
• “Building C — breaker replacement, electrical room”

One document, every address, every job. The accounting office can approve it in one pass and charge each line to the right property.

What Goes on the Statement

Every line comes from the jobs your techs completed. The prices are from your own service list, whether that is a $99 service call, a $165 GFCI replacement, a $149 safety inspection or a lighting maintenance visit you price per building. Line items and sales tax carry over the same way they would on a single invoice.

Because the statement is built from completed jobs, the work your techs did and the bill the account receives always match. If a tech added a line item on site because the manager asked for an extra fixture, it shows up on the statement for that address.

That also means nobody in your office has to rebuild the month from memory or a pile of paper tickets. The statement is already sitting there when the month ends, made from the same jobs the techs worked on their phones.

Residential and Commercial Side by Side

Monthly billing is per client, so you do not have to pick one billing style for the whole company. Homeowners can keep paying per job with a card on file charged when the tech taps Complete. Commercial accounts can be set to Monthly. Both run on the same dispatch board and the same tech app, and the tech does not have to do anything different at a monthly account's address. They complete the job, and the office handles the rest.

Mixing the two styles in one schedule is covered in Mixing Commercial and Residential Electrical Work in One Schedule.

Getting Paid on Time

A statement only helps if it gets paid. The account can view invoices and pay online from the customer app, and can keep a card on file for charging on a schedule if they prefer. Past-due follow-up goes out on its own when a statement sits too long, so your office is not the one making awkward calls.

Many commercial accounts pay by their own process no matter what, and that is fine. The value of the statement is that it is easy for them to approve, which is usually what slows payment down.

Setting It Up

Turning on monthly billing for an account takes a few steps:

• Make sure every location is an address under one client, not a separate client.
• Set the client's billing to Monthly.
• Check that each address has a clear name, like a unit number or store number, so statement lines are easy to read.
• Let the account know they will get one statement each month.

The first statement is the real test. If their accounting office approves it without a question, the setup is right.

Why It Keeps Accounts

Commercial accounts change electricians when the paperwork becomes a hassle as often as when the work goes wrong. One clean monthly statement removes a reason to leave. For more on how billing fits with addresses, plans and inspection reports, head back to the commercial electrical software overview.