10 HVAC Invoicing Tips For Contractors in 2023 [+Free Template]

1. Email HVAC Invoice Forms Directly to the Customer

The best time to send an HVAC invoice to a customer is immediately after offering the HVAC service. If possible, do this before the technician leaves the location. 

In fact, it’s advisable to make it a part of the checklist a technician must complete before leaving the client’s location.

That reduces the likelihood of invoicing errors and increases the chances of the customer paying early. They could even pay before the technician gets back to the office.

It’s also a good time for the technician to recommend upgrades and deliver personalized service, which can gain you a repeat HVAC maintenance customer for life.

To make it easier for HVAC technicians, you could consider using ServiceTitan's invoicing software.

With ServiceTitan's Field Service App, technicians can see exactly how much a repair service costs, with the help of a fully updated pricebook.

Additionally, technicians can switch to presentation mode, allowing customers to scroll through the various tier estimates available. 

This eliminates the need for time-wasting sales pitches and places the customer in the driving seat.

2. Seek Permission from Customers Before Sending the Invoice

Sometimes, HVAC customers don’t pay invoices because they never saw them. 

And in most cases, it may be because the HVAC company sent it to a platform they rarely use. Or maybe the client recently changed their number or lost access to their email address.

So, encourage your techs to ask the client about the channel or platform where they prefer to receive their invoices. Or your CSR can put a call to the customer to ask if they'd prefer to receive a text or email.

3. Give Your Techs an Easy-to-Use HVAC Invoice Template

For many HVAC companies, invoicing in the field is a major challenge.

Techs either return to the office to get higher-ups to physically validate an invoice or spend time on calls to the office to get sign-off on an invoice before giving it to the client.

Additionally, it makes it difficult for dispatchers to know the arrival time of techs and their current workload without constant calls. Sam Krause of Techmasters faced the same challenge.

“I’d call techs while they were on a job and ask, ‘Do you know how much longer this is going to take?’ he says.

“It required constant communication, juggling, pushing things around, and a lot of sweating it out and telling other customers, ‘Yeah, we're going to come.’ But not knowing for sure if we're going to get out there, and not enough predictability of how busy we were.”

This back-and-forth is inefficient, increases the chances of errors, and consumes the time techs are supposed to spend fixing an HVAC issue or upselling the customer.

With an invoice template, techs in the field can simply fill in customer and job details in the provided fields. Take, for example, the free ServiceTitan customizable invoice template:

Providing techs with an invoice template they can fill out in real time has several advantages. They include:

1. Saves the time of techs, helping them spend more time on ensuring your customer’s HVAC issues are fixed properly.

2. Enables techs to generate an invoice right there in the field. This eliminates errors like duplicate billing and missing items or services.

3. Saves your HVAC business time. Admin employees and HVAC technicians can focus on more productive tasks.

4. Promotes consistency in invoice layout, entrenching your brand in the minds of customers and making it easy for them to find any information they need.

5. Makes it easy to spot errors. Team members can easily scan invoices for errors since every customer’s information is always in the same place.

But aside from making it easy to create invoices in the field, it’s important to make it easy for techs to process them there, too.

4. Make HVAC Invoices Processing Easy in the Field

It’s great to give HVAC techs templates. But it’s also critical to teach them to use the template properly.

Show them:

• Specific fields they need to fill out

• Information you want on every invoice

But to further simplify on-site invoice processing, techs must have all the customer details they need to fill out the invoice in their hands. Otherwise, they'll still have to call the office to get customer details, which defeats the goal of having a template.

For that reason, you could consider using ServiceTitan’s HVAC mobile app.

With it, your techs can take pictures of customer’s checks or credit cards with their mobile device while in the field and post a customer’s payment to your accounting system automatically.

This way, office staff will make fewer trips to the bank and have time to focus on other important business activities.

Additionally, techs can easily access the entire service history of customers and the maintenance contracts they're on.

This arms your techs with information to provide top-notch personalized services to customers and avoid selling them services they've already bought. This delivers a positive customer experience.

5. Centralize Customer Information

One thing that makes it harder to create accurate invoices is customer information being scattered and not centralized.

There’s no single source of truth staff can consult when they need to confirm a customer’s name or payment history.

So, ensure every customer detail is stored in a centralized location, preferably, a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This way, every customer record will be available at your fingertips.

If you prefer to pay for one mega application that does everything, instead of subscribing to several tools at once, you could use a home service application like ServiceTitan.

For example, an HVAC service software like ServiceTitan’s stores all relevant customer details in a central location, so your employees don't need to hop from one platform to another or search through paper documents when they need important details.

The moment a customer support representative (CSR) gets a call, the system automatically notifies them if the customer is a returning customer and helps them collect all the relevant information.

This way, CSRs can try to sell only services and equipment the customer needs and has yet to purchase. 

And since the details are stored in the cloud, techs have access to the same information from their mobile device—Android, iOS, or tablet—while in the field.

6. Send HVAC Invoices to the Right Clients

A customer can’t pay an invoice they never receive. So, it’s important for your CSR to always send HVAC service order invoices to the right clients.

They can always cross-check the details on the invoice before clicking send. And you could use a software solution to organize your client list and keep all customer information within reach of your CSRs.

An example of such a solution is ServiceTitan's HVAC Service software.

Its robust CRM feature houses vital customer data such as invoices, contact information, company name (if it’s a commercial client), phone numbers, service notes, work orders, and so on.

Employees can find all the customer information they need in one place, instead of rummaging through a mountain of paper documents. This ensures they include the right information on the invoice and deliver it to the correct address.

To increase transparency, ServiceTitan also allows you to grant commercial clients access to their own private portal, where they can see their complete job history, pay invoices, and request work orders.

Additionally, it integrates with accounting software—QuickBooks, Intacct, and Viewpoint Vista. 

This automates your accounting process, so field techs and the admin team can focus on other important tasks, and you can focus on managing your HVAC business.

It also ensures finance and tech teams have access to the same financial data, reducing invoicing errors.

7. Track Unpaid HVAC Work Invoices Early

Leaving the tracking of invoices for later will result in late payments.

Notify customers of their late invoices early, by text or email, and make it easy to collect payments. Also, automate the invoicing process with digital invoicing.

This lessens the load on your front-office staff and improves your operational efficiency.

To make it easy to see all unpaid invoices and send early reminders, consider using ServiceTitan's HVAC Invoicing Software.

It allows you to track outstanding balances on invoices via the Accounts Receivable Summary Report…

…which shows all the invoices that are yet to be paid, helping you keep track. Here’s an explanation of each field:

• Customer—The customer’s name.

• Phones—The customer’s phone number.

• Balance—The outstanding balance for a customer.

• <= 30—Outstanding balance for less than or equal to 30 days.

• 31-60—Outstanding balance for 31 to 60 days.

• 61-90—Outstanding balance for 61 to 90 days.

• 91-120—Outstanding balance for 91 to 120 days.

• >120—Outstanding balance for more than 120 days.

To receive your monthly account summary at a specific time, you can click "schedule" next to the report.

Additionally, you can use ServiceTitan's email marketing functionality to bulk-send reminders to customers with outstanding balances on their invoices.

Simply create an audience consisting of only customers with outstanding balances, craft an email reminder, and send it out.

8. Offer a Variety of Payment Options

Some customers may prefer to pay with cash. Others may want to pay only with credit cards. 

So, it’s advisable to provide multiple methods customers can use to pay you while in the field. That’s why we created the Payments Feature in ServiceTitan’s mobile application.

The Payments Feature enables on-site HVAC techs to collect payments by snapping checks and credit cards using their mobile device or giving customers a link to a unique payment portal.

You can even process refunds directly through the app to avoid the hassle of third-party processing and invoice adjustments.

9. Record all Invoices, Service Contracts, and Maintenance Agreements

Businesses grow. And so do the number of clients and the amount of records you have to manage.

To stay on top of it, use a well-organized filing system that all front-office staff can get accustomed to.

That way, your CSRs and HVAC techs can find the invoices, past service contracts, or ongoing maintenance agreements of any customer when they're creating an invoice. 

And last but not least…

10. Upsell a Service Contract or Maintenance Agreement to Your HVAC Customers

Service contracts and maintenance agreements are hard to sell.

However, Jaime DiDomenico, president of Cool Today, has grown his business with the help of 17,000 memberships. And according to him, they’re not that hard to sell after all.

In a recent ServiceTitan webinar, he gave the following tips, which he has used to great success:

• Highlight the value of a membership to customers by highlighting the money and time it saves, and the peace of mind they’ll enjoy. You could also include it on your website.

• Appreciate long-term members with thank-you notes, gift packages, and member-only events.

• Reward employees who sell memberships with commissions, bonuses, and recognition during internal meetings.

Additionally, you could empower techs to create and sell service contracts and maintenance agreements while in the field, with an HVAC Management App like ServiceTitan.

With it, techs can review customer property details to spot upsell opportunities…

…and build good-better-best pricing estimate tiers to present to clients alongside their invoices.

They can include extra monthly charges to cover more tasks, upgrades to higher service tiers, sign-ups for additional maintenance services, and so on.

And to ensure the invoices stay accurate and that your service business is still making a profit, ServiceTitan keeps track of labor and material costs.

Customers can then look through the tiers and select one that matches their budgets.

HVAC Invoice Software Helps Educate Customers

A skilled tradesman in the HVAC industry knows exactly how to repair a furnace or install a new compressor, but that’s only one part of an HVAC service technician’s job. They also need to be on the lookout for opportunities to upsell products and services, and clearly communicate the benefits of each as they present an HVAC invoice to the homeowner.

Nikolai Matveev, owner of Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air, offers weekly training sessions to help his technicians and sales staff clearly explain to customers the complicated mechanical topics listed on the HVAC service invoices. He also makes sure the techs present good, better, and best choices on every invoice. 

“We want to make sure whoever we send out there, they can explain it really well. If the customer has some kind of concern, they can address those, and by the end of the day, they close the job and make sure everybody’s happy,” Matveev says.

The key to making everyone happy? Communicating in a knowledgeable but easy-to-understand and presentable way, says Chris Graham, who runs a one-man air conditioning and refrigeration business for residential and commercial HVAC customers in Texas.

“Look at the whole picture, for installation and just for everything,the equipment age and the home age, and wrap it all up into a presentation, and it sells itself, basically,” Graham says.

For commercial HVAC jobs, knowledge and presentation are especially important, he says, because a contractor must typically work through a 

chain of command to get sign-off for an HVAC service invoice. “You have to keep up with the technology because it’s constantly changing and it’s more sophisticated equipment,” Graham says.

Now Over to You

The profitability of your HVAC business largely relies on your invoicing efficiency, in addition to providing excellent customer service.  

Every labor and material cost must be reflected. And techs should be able to book and upsell services from the field to ensure you're not losing revenue.

And to keep customers satisfied, invoices should be accurate and appear professional—especially those for commercial clients.

So, implement the tips above and use a tool like ServiceTitan to boost your invoicing efficiency.

ServiceTitan is a robust all-in-one HVAC software trusted by many HVAC companies. It helps them streamline and automate key business operations like invoicing, increasing efficiency, and limiting errors. You can schedule a free demo to try it out.