ElectricalBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Billing Reports for Electrical Contractors: What Is Paid, What Is Owed and What Came In

Plenty of small electrical shop owners can tell you exactly how many panel upgrades they did last month and which tech was fastest on service calls. Far fewer can tell you, without an hour with a spreadsheet, how much they billed, how much came in and how much is still owed. That is not because they do not care. It is because the numbers live in an invoice book, a bank statement and a folder of unpaid bills that never get put side by side.

Seeing the Picture Behind Cash Flow

The previous guide, Cash Flow for a Small Electrical Shop: Closing the Gap Between the Work and the Money, ended on the point that you cannot manage what you cannot see. Reports are how you see it.

In ElectricalBossPro, invoices and payments are created inside the same system that ran the job, so the reports are built from the real records, not from what someone remembered to type into a spreadsheet.

Three Questions Every Owner Should Be Able to Answer

Good billing reports answer three questions quickly:

• What did we bill? The invoices created for completed work.
• What came in? The payments collected, whether from the card on file at completion, scheduled auto-charge or online payment in the customer app.
• What is still owed? The open invoices and statements that have not been paid yet.

ElectricalBossPro's reports give you that view, so you are not rebuilding it at the end of the month.

Why the Numbers Are Trustworthy

Reports are only as good as the records underneath them. In a paper or spreadsheet shop, the records have gaps: invoices never entered, payments recorded twice, a deposit nobody wrote down. In ElectricalBossPro:

• Invoices are created from the job when the tech taps Complete, so completed work is not left unbilled by accident.
• Payments land on the invoice they belong to, whether charged to the card on file or paid in the customer app.
• Deposits are billed as their own invoice or line item on the client, so they show up like any other billing.
• Monthly statements for property managers and commercial accounts are built from the same jobs.

What Reports Help You Decide

Billing reports are not just for the accountant. They help with everyday decisions in a small shop:

• When to order equipment for the next big install.
• Whether to add a van or a tech based on what is actually coming in.
• Which accounts need attention because they keep showing up on the open list.
• Whether your billing setup is working. If the open list is mostly customers without a card on file, that is a sign to ask more customers to save one.

Reports and Office Roles

Not everyone in the office needs to see every number. ElectricalBossPro has office user roles, so the owner can give each person in the office a role that fits their job. The person who handles billing is set up for billing, and the owner keeps the full view. More on that in Who Bills What: The Office, the Tech and the Owner in Electrical Billing.

A Monthly Habit

Reports are most useful when someone looks at them on a regular schedule. A simple monthly habit for a small shop:

• Look at what was billed and what came in for the month.
• Check the open list and see whether anything has been sitting too long.
• Make sure every Monthly account's statement went out and was paid.
• Glance at how plan customers are doing, and whether plan visits are being completed and billed.

Fifteen minutes a month with real numbers beats a full evening with a spreadsheet at the end of the quarter.

Reports Plus the Rest of the System

Reports are the summary. The detail is always one click away. If a number looks off, the office can open the client and see each invoice, its line items and sales tax, its payment, and the job behind it with photos and notes. That link between the summary and the job is what a spreadsheet can never give you.

Clients also have tags and custom fields, which help you keep track of groups of customers, such as plan customers or property manager accounts, when you are looking over your billing.

Know Your Numbers Without the Spreadsheet

Billing reports turn the invoices and payments your shop already creates into answers: what you billed, what came in, and what is still owed. In ElectricalBossPro, they are built from the same records that ran the job, so they are as accurate as the work itself. To see reports alongside the rest of the billing tools, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrical invoicing software page.