Invoicing apps can help electrical contractors create and deliver professional invoices to their customers. However, there are a number of operational inefficiencies for businesses that rely on software solutions that only do invoicing (or invoicing and payments).
For example:
Inability to integrate with the other software tools you use to run your business (e.g. dispatching, call booking, or estimating software)
The need to repeatedly enter the same customer and job information into multiple platforms
Customer information, job history, and financial data spread out over separate, often-disconnected platforms
To address these and other often-unanticipated obstacles, many electrical businesses are turning to holistic electrical contractor software such as our product, ServiceTitan, which seamlessly integrates invoicing with virtually all of an electrical company’s core business processes.
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In this post, we’ll show you how ServiceTitan’s invoicing features work, as well as how our software joins invoicing with the many other moving parts of an electrical contracting business.
Finally, we’ll close out with an overview of 6 other electrician invoice apps to think about when you’re making your decision.
We’ll cover the following options:
But before we get into details of the various solutions, let’s look at some of the downsides of relying on invoicing point solutions (i.e. invoicing software that only handles invoicing).
Want to see how ServiceTitan works to streamline your electrical business operations? Schedule a call to get a free, live, one-on-one walkthrough of the features we describe throughout this article.
The Pitfalls of Invoicing Point Solutions for Electrical Contractors
The overarching drawback to invoicing-only apps is that they tend to separate invoicing from other central processes of an electrical service business. Part of the reason is that they’re usually not designed to integrate with the software tools electrical business owners often use to handle other tasks, such as payroll, dispatching, scheduling, and timesheets.
That means that when electricians use this kind of app, they likely have to manually copy over information from work orders and estimates, pulling figures and job details from various files, software products, mobile apps, spreadsheets, and documents.
This is a time-consuming and laborious process. And every time a contractor using this method transfers information from one interface to another, there’s a chance for errors — typos, miscalculations, plain forgetfulness.
In the context of an invoice, even small mistakes can translate into serious issues, such as damaged customer relationships and underpayment, to name just a few.
To make matters worse, invoicing-only electrical apps often have old-fashioned design and less-than-intuitive interfaces, and they lack the advanced mobile functionality and API frequently featured in more modern, holistic electrical software.
There’s also the matter of cost. Electrician software that handles only invoicing often looks quite affordable. But the true measure of cost is ROI.
Without features such as pricebook integration, job management, work order management, and inventory management, standalone invoicing apps are often much more expensive than they initially appear — particularly since they also lack customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
Next, as a point of contrast, let’s dig into how ServiceTitan’s electrical invoicing features work to unite all of an electrician’s most important business functions in a single platform.
In addition to invoicing itself, we’ll take a look at three broad areas that are especially closely related, so our overview will look like this:
Invoicing
Scheduling and dispatching
Estimates and proposals
Payments and financing
How ServiceTitan Integrates Invoicing with Other Core Electrical Contracting Business Functions
Electrical contractors who use ServiceTitan know the software automatically uses all the vital details that appear in their quotes and estimates — parts, hourly rates, and more — to populate invoices. So when it’s time to actually put their invoices together, not a whole lot remains to be done.
An additional benefit of this seamless, streamlined approach to creating invoices is that it helps make sure customers don’t encounter any unwelcome news on their final bill.
Of course, unforeseen circumstances are bound to arise at least occasionally over the course of an electrical job, necessitating new equipment, materials, and tasks; we automate the process to ensure those make it onto invoices, too.
ServiceTitan invoices are clean, professional, and can be delivered just like our proposals — via email, with a link to allow customers to pay online.
These can be e-signed via desktop or mobile device. Like most ServiceTitan documents, our invoices are printable, and can thus be delivered by hand or traditional mail, if needed. These options make it easy for electrical business owners to deliver an invoice to the homeowner, landlord, property manager, or tenant.
In addition to reflecting the balance due and all of the salient details of the job, each ServiceTitan invoice features a summary providing a detailed description of work completed and the long-term prognosis — an effective guard against future disagreements.
To give customers an even clearer sense of the value of their work, electrical contractors can use ServiceTitan to attach before-and-after photos and video of job sites to their invoices. This feature can be especially helpful on commercial jobs, for which the owner is often not present, reducing denials and improving the chances of prompt payment.
Dispatching and Scheduling
A well-executed invoice is in some ways simply an expression of all the work that has already gone into a given electrical project to date.
With ServiceTitan, that work begins before a customer service rep has even answered an incoming call.
Our business software automatically provides the CSR with the name and location of the caller, plus useful property information, such as the address and age of the building, its square footage, and sometimes the types of systems they currently have: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, etc.
CSRs can use such data to schedule calls quickly and accurately, drawing on the information at their fingertips to better serve clients and improve relationships.
Our call booking features also do double-duty — helping electrical contractors to book new business, even as they collect and preserve valuable, highly detailed customer information — all with an easy-to-use workflow of intuitive dropdowns.
To make the most of their ServiceTitan subscription, a lot of the electrical contractors we work with deploy our color-coded tags to help them organize their bookings. This feature lets service businesses sort upcoming jobs according to customizable characteristics: tools and/or know-how required, time necessary to complete, and more.
ServiceTitan tags communicate key information quickly to help users avoid having techs arrive at jobs without the tools (or the time) they need to do their best work.
Furthermore, the ServiceTitan electrician app provides dispatchers with a real-time view of where techs are in their job cycles. That way, as things come up, they can tweak and adjust painlessly as needed, re-routing or re-assigning to best meet the requirements of their employer, their customers, and the circumstances of the day.
When techs reach their jobs sites, ServiceTitan has already given them the opportunity to educate themselves with a ton of information: customer needs and preferences, on-the-ground conditions, service history, and outstanding requests. They can even listen to recordings of calls between customers and CSRs — allowing them to understand in greater detail what their current assignments might entail.
For electrical business owners and managers, our call recording feature is also a favorite way to keep tabs on CSRs, ensuring that they follow customer support scripts and best practices. In addition, in the event of a disagreement with a customer — for example, if a homeowner says that one of the company’s team members quoted them a much lower figure than they were actually charged — call recordings come in handy in figuring out the truth.
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Estimates and Proposals
Before electricians can invoice, of course, they have to win business. And as we’ve written before, for residential work, the most effective way to do that is by being able to efficiently and reliably provide accurate, professional, option-based Good-Better-Best proposals.
Good-Better-Best proposals can help electricians increase close rates and average ticket prices, while improving customer service by placing more decision-making power in the hands of homeowners.
That’s why at ServiceTitan, we’ve built our estimates and proposals functionality specifically to optimize an option-based sales model with a fully customizable workflow of easy-to-use templates.
As we noted above, ServiceTitan invoices are automatically populated with all of the vital information field service technicians collect in order to create proposals. And in keeping with our platform’s holistic approach to project management, the process of creating ServiceTitan estimates is similarly interlinked with other related business processes.
Two examples of this include:
Pricebook integration: A basic ServiceTitan subscription gives electrical contractors the ability to upload their own pricebooks or build new, customizable pricebooks from scratch within the platform. Either way, ServiceTitan pricebooks link automatically with our electrical estimating software; that way, proposals include the real, precise items and prices that will be used in jobs. With our Pricebook Pro add-on, contractors can choose to leverage our pre-built flat rate pricebook, maintained and updated by our team of industry pros — allowing them to save time and further improve efficiency.
Follow-up: Many of our users like to use our Alerts feature to prompt themselves — or, more likely, their employees — with notifications to follow up on unsold estimates, ensuring that they don’t leave cash on the table. MarketingPro, meanwhile, furnishes a variety of more advanced follow-up capabilities, allowing service businesses to create highly specific campaigns with targeted emails, texts, and mailers.
In the service industry, the terms “estimate” and “proposal” are often used interchangeably. But at ServiceTitan, we define each choice, or option, in a presentation as an “estimate.” In this context, it’s helpful to think of a “proposal” as a series of several estimates.
As illustrated in the screenshot above, after basic customer data has been input, creating an estimate template is simply a matter of adding product and service descriptions, and dragging and dropping pricebook items.
Once contractors have designed their estimate options, they can present them in a proposal to homeowners.
A ServiceTitan proposal takes minutes to assemble — a matter of drag and drop. It can include as many estimates, in whatever price range, as the electrician prefers.
Techs can use an iPhone, Android, iPad, or other iOS devices to create proposals while they’re out in the field with the ServiceTitan mobile app. These are available instantaneously to show homeowners.
All of ServiceTitan’s functionality is also accessible via desktop, so proposals can be printed and delivered by hand, mail, or email, too.
After reviewing deal terms, scope of work, and other important job details, customers can e-sign to approve a job while their tech is still on site. That way, work can be immediately scheduled.
Payments and Financing
ServiceTitan gives electrical contractors a number of options for collecting payment. Customers can enter their credit card information into our customer portal, or they can pay via our mobile app. Cash and checks still work, too!
Particularly for big-ticket jobs, simply closing the deal can be challenging. ServiceTitan has a solution for that, too: financing options that allow customers to apply and get approved almost instantaneously.
As revenue rolls in, electrical contractors can leverage our QuickBooks integration — designed to maximize ease of use — to keep it all organized.
In our experience, electricians who take a piecemeal approach to organizing their business — using different apps and software solutions for functions such as estimating, dispatching, invoicing, and payments — tend to create workflow inefficiencies and opportunities for mistakes. When invoicing is artificially disconnected from directly related business functions, the result is often inhibited growth and constricted revenue flow.
Put another way: While electrician invoice point solutions might technically have a lower price tag than more advanced, comprehensive electrical contractor software products, their long-term cost, in terms of business setbacks, can be significant.
In contrast, products such as ServiceTitan allow electrician business owners to spend less time coordinating disjointed software products, fixing errors, and attending to emergencies, leaving them free to focus on streamlining workflows to optimize their business processes, get ahead of the competition, and grow revenue.
Want to see how ServiceTitan works to streamline your electrical business operations? Schedule a call to get a free, live, one-on-one walkthrough of the features we describe throughout this article.
Other Electrician Invoice Apps
Joist
Joist is an app that specializes in estimating, invoicing, and payments for contractors.
Their product, like ServiceTitan, has a mobile app for facilitating these business functions in the field or office. They also offer a QuickBooks integration to sync activity with your accounting.
However, Joist is still a relative point solution, lacking tools for other key business activities such as scheduling and dispatching, managing maintenance agreements, reporting, or marketing.
JobFLEX
Like Joist, JobFLEX is an estimating and invoicing point solution for contractors.
They offer similar features such as mobile functionality and the ability to create estimates and invoices, however JobFLEX doesn’t appear to offer payment functionality.
And like Joist, they don’t offer features or the ability to seamlessly integrate with the other core tools you use to run your business.
HouseCall Pro
HouseCall Pro is a holistic FSM solution for home service businesses. Similar to ServiceTitan, they offer a wide range of features outside of invoicing, such as scheduling and dispatching, estimates, QuickBooks integration, and more.
We’ve written a detailed comparison of our two products, which you can find here: Housecall Pro vs. ServiceTitan
Jobber
Jobber is a field service scheduling software that also offers a wide range of other features for running a field service business. Like ServiceTitan, they offer functionality for estimating, quotes, scheduling, invoicing, and more.
We’ve written a detailed comparison of our two products, which you can find here: Jobber vs. ServiceTitan
Service Fusion
Service Fusion describes itself as an “All-In-One Field ServiceManagement Software.” Like ServiceTitan, they offer a wide range of features including estimates, invoices, customer management, scheduling and dispatching, and more.
We’ve written a detailed comparison of our two products, which you can find here:Service Fusion vs. ServiceTitan
FieldEdge
FieldEdge is a field service management software and field service app for service businesses. They offer a wide range of features like ServiceTitan, including functionality for quotes and invoicing, scheduling and dispatching, service agreements, and more.
We’ve written a detailed comparison of our two products, which you can find here: FieldEdge vs. ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan Electrical Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive electrical business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
