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Plumbing Invoice Template: Get Paid & Minimize Hassles (with Free PDF Download)
Plumbing
All too often, it seems like getting paid for a plumbing job can be just as tough as the job itself. That’s because a lot of things can go wrong when you’re dealing with multiple spreadsheets, hand-written invoices, and service techs who are trying to keep track of cash, checks, and paperwork.
Without effective invoicing procedures, plumbing businesses are often forced to waste time and energy chasing down paperwork and trying to get paid. Plumbers who use pen-and-paper invoicing, or who take a piecemeal approach to implementing software solutions, can run into problematic issues:
Non-payments and delayed payments
Chargebacks on credit cards
Bad debt and big-ticket write-offs
Legal challenges and damaged reputation
For business owners who are looking to improve invoicing, a blank invoice template is a good place to start. It provides consistent formatting and a professional design, and it helps ensure that techs and office staff collect the necessary information to handle billing and collection.
Keep in mind, though: an invoice template is only one piece of the puzzle. It won’t fix deeper problems with basic processes, like illegible handwriting and misplaced paperwork, manual data entry, delays in receiving payments, and the other serious consequences we mentioned above.
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This article explains how plumbing businesses can use the invoicing template we’ve provided. We’ll also discuss how ServiceTitan’s plumbing software can help you improve your entire invoicing process, provide better customer service, and get paid on time instead of dealing with expensive and time-consuming errors.
Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll discuss:
Want a first-hand look at how ServiceTitan’s invoicing features work to solve the common problems in collecting payment? Schedule a call to see it in action and learn how we can help.
How to Download and Use Our Plumbing Invoice Template
To use our sample plumbing invoice template, simply download it and save it to your computer as a blank invoice. Then you can open it, customize it, and save it as a new file for each client. Enter each client’s information directly into the PDF and print it for mail delivery or attach the PDF in an email.
Our customizable invoice template features a professional layout with the necessary fields to fill in:
Contact information (including your company name, address, and phone number)
Invoice number
Plumbing work performed
Hours worked
Payment terms
Subtotal, sales tax, and total amount due
Alternatively, we’ve also created a free, interactive web tool for you to easily create invoices right through our website:
Our invoice generator includes the same fields as our PDF template, but it’s all online. It allows techs to create an invoice in the field, save it, and email it to customers and the office from their mobile device.
If your plumbing business is having difficulty with invoicing issues, the free download and invoice generator are partial solutions, at least for the short term. Either one of those options is certainly better than writing invoices out by hand or typing them up from scratch for every job.
If you really want to grow your business, though, it’s worth considering a more comprehensive solution to actually manage your entire invoicing process more efficiently. A tool like ServiceTitan’s plumbing invoicing software can save you time, minimize the risk of errors, and automatically integrate invoicing with other aspects of your business.
Ultimately it can help you avoid the pains of manual data entry, accounting issues, miscommunications between staff and customers, and the other costly problems that come with traditional processes.
Let’s take a closer look at these challenges and then walk through how ServiceTitan helps solve them.
The Challenges of Managing Plumbing Invoices
Invoicing is more complex than it seems, and managing invoices can be tricky if you don’t have a complete, easy-to-use system for keeping track of everything. Plumbing contractors who rely on paper invoicing or inadequate software solutions often experience the following problems:
1. Confusion and Frustration
Hand-written invoices can be difficult for customers to read and understand. Even among your own crew, errors and confusion can result if you and your techs lack a convenient way to save and share information about cost estimates, parts required, and other important information about the jobs they’re working on.
2. Invoices Don’t Match Quotes
This can be a serious issue that eats into your profits. If your crew installs the wrong fixtures, for example, you might have to absorb the difference between what you quoted and what they installed, or your crew might even need to re-do the job.
3. Improper Documentation
Jobs that aren’t documented properly can result in lost time and reduced profits. An incomplete invoice might lack signatures approving a work order and/or certifying that the work was done. Clients might be uncertain about who performed the work, which parts and materials your plumbers used, or even if your crew performed any work at all.
4. Disputed Charges
If a client receives your invoice late, denies the work was done, or is confused about the work your plumbing crew performed, the client can dispute the charge. This can lead to expensive legal battles, cash flow issues, and the cascading effects of damage to your credit.
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How ServiceTitan Streamlines the Entire Plumbing Invoicing Process
It might be tempting to use Word, Excel, Google Docs, or Google Sheets to create plumbing service invoices, but managing a complicated patchwork of different documents is difficult and time-consuming. ServiceTitan consolidates and streamlines your invoices and other business data to create a user-friendly experience for you, your team, and your clients.
By digitizing and automatically syncing all the data associated with plumbing invoicing, and by seamlessly integrating invoicing with the rest of a plumbing company’s business practices, ServiceTitan helps business owners save time, improve customer service, and focus on growing their businesses.
What follows are some of the core benefits of using ServiceTitan as your invoicing solution:
Clear Communication and Documentation
ServiceTitan helps you impress your customers with a clean, professional invoice that clearly states the terms, the amount due, and all other pertinent information. You can also easily send invoices by email, prompt clients to pay online, and request reviews for your business.
From the business side of the software, office staff or techs in the field can quickly find client records by searching customer names or service locations, which is particularly useful for rental units or commercial accounts. Your crew can send an invoice to a landlord, a property manager, and a tenant all at once.
Parts, hourly rates, and other vital information are clearly shown on quotes and then automatically pre-populated in work orders and invoices. This minimizes confusion and ensures clients get the services and products they were quoted. Techs can also add tasks while they’re on the job.
In the Summary section, techs are prompted to provide a clear and complete write-up of the work performed and the expected outcome. This narrative decreases the chance that questions and disagreements will arise at a later date.
In addition to improving communication between you and your clients, ServiceTitan also enables seamless communication between the home office and techs out in the field.
Along with relevant pre-populated fields, the software also provides a Notes section so techs can leave informal notes for their colleagues who respond to the next call at a particular address: a heads-up about a particularly small crawlspace, for instance, or advice on where to park.
ServiceTitan also allows techs to easily attach cellphone photos and videos to invoices. This feature allows your crew to document plumbing issues that they observe when they arrive and then show how they solved the problem. This clear visual evidence is particularly helpful for commercial customers or rental properties, when the property owner is typically not on site.
By selecting the Print View option, the tech can view the customer-facing version of the invoice, which is synced with data from the job quote and new any details the tech entered while on the job. This screen also prompts the customer to provide signatures authorizing work to be done and acknowledging work that’s been completed.
ServiceTitan’s thorough documentation helps avoid disputes by proving that the customer signed off on the job and approved payment.
Avoid Human Error
Everyone makes mistakes, and human error poses risks to any business. Those risks are compounded when you’re using pen-and-paper estimates and invoices. That’s because handwritten paperwork can go missing, get damaged, or contain incomplete or illegible information. In case of an audit or dispute, this can leave business owners vulnerable to fiscal and legal problems.
Even if you use QuickBooks for accounting, you’ve probably found that your office employees spend a great deal of time manually entering information from handwritten invoices into your QuickBooks account. ServiceTitan’s seamless QuickBooks integration, on the other hand, automatically synchronizes all entries in real time. That minimizes the chance of introducing errors and frees up office staff to work on more profitable tasks.
By consolidating and integrating all your business functions into one software system, you can save staff time, improve customer service, and ensure that your books are always in order.
Most Importantly, Get Paid
ServiceTitan helps make sure your invoice puts the right information in the right hands at the right time. The service makes it easy to accept online payments so you can streamline bookkeeping tasks and avoid dealing in cash or checks.
Even if payment and signatures are collected on-site, you can still use ServiceTitan’s Email Invoice feature to provide your customers with a digital receipt and documentation of the work performed by your crew.
We provide templates to make it easy, and you can even add links for clients to leave online reviews on sites like Google Business or Yelp.
A Complete Software Solution for Plumbing Businesses
In many ways, invoicing is the lifeblood of your business. Cashflow is vital to keep your business in operation and invoicing is interconnected with other functions like payroll, dispatching, and bookkeeping. By streamlining data entry and consolidating all those functions in one software system, ServiceTitan helps you:
Improve communication between you, your crew, and your customers
Get paid on time
Ensure accuracy and efficiency
Avoid disputes
Are you ready to streamline your plumbing invoicing? Schedule a call today to see how we can help you take control and integrate your invoicing to the other aspects of your business, so you can spend more time doing what you do best.
