ServiceTitan Payables takes Tony’s Plumbing Service from ‘This Whole Mess’ to One-Click Efficiency

Why Tony’s Plumbing growth leads to ServiceTitan Payables

Before using ServiceTitan, Tony’s Plumbing was a paper-only operation. After implementing ServiceTitan, the one office employee continued to manually enter all of the bills and purchase orders into QuickBooks, after which Molica says his mom spent hours every month manually trying to reconcile all of the statements.

“The one office person wasn't the greatest at using ServiceTitan,” Molica explains. “My mom would have to go in and reconcile all the statements. She'd go to this portal and pay this person, and call the credit card in on this one, and write a check for this one, and all that different stuff.

“It was kind of this whole mess,” he adds.

To clean things up and operate more efficiently, Tony’s Plumbing first hired a new bookkeeper who embraced the idea of managing all accounts payable from one central hub. Then the plumbing company agreed to beta-test ServiceTitan’s new Payables feature to automate and more accurately reconcile its accounts.

Create and manage bills, statements, and credits in one system, while automatically calculating payment terms and discounts.

“Getting the bookkeeper on board, that was what kept us from being successful previously,” Molica says. “Now, I have a new bookkeeper who's fantastic. She wants everything to be one process. It’s way easier for her.”

With ServiceTitan Payables, Molica says the new bookkeeper was able to take over all accounts payable within 60 days, allowing both of his parents to fully retire.

“She literally just prepares everything for payment, and says, ‘Here you go, approve them,’” Molica says. “And I literally click one button.” 

Bookkeepers can create bills and statements and send them to business owners or AP managers to approve.

Simplify everything accounts payables, and save time

Payables streamlines the time-consuming process of AP management and replaces it with an easy-to-use solution, allowing customers to enter, approve, and send payments to vendors with just a few clicks in ServiceTitan. Ultimately, business owners and accounting admins gain more visibility, increase efficiencies, and have flexible control over bill management.

Key features available through Payables allows companies to:

• Increase AP Visibility — Gain a real-time, easy-to-digest view into what’s owed, what’s pending, and what’s been paid, while gaining more job costing insights.

• Effortlessly Pay Bills — Approve bills, apply credits, pay vendors via their preferred payment method, and finish with a quick payment record export to QuickBooks Desktop or Intacct.

• Maintain Flexible Control — Assign permissions to trusted team members, and let them pay on a bill-by-bill basis or in bulk with statements.

• Reduce Reconciliation Time — Quickly identify 3-way matching across PO, invoice, and payment, allowing for faster discrepancy resolution. 

• Scale for Growth — Increase your team’s bandwidth by removing the manual work of paper payments and manual follow-ups.

Molica says it’s hard to quantify the total time savings gained by using Payables, but it’s “many, many hours.” For instance, there’s no longer any back-and-forth to obtain approvals and signatures, there’s no cutting of checks, and no need for a trip to the post office to mail payments.

“There's a lot of time savings there,” Molica says. “And then the new thing, too, with the ability to download your statement out of ServiceTitan. You can download your statement from your vendor and match them up. That’s going to save a lot of hours, too.”

Vendors for Tony’s Plumbing Service also prefer a more efficient way of getting paid. The company currently has about 50 vendors in its account, 30 of which they consistently pay each month—but now with no need to cut paper checks for each one, as bill-pay through ServiceTitan handles the process digitally.

“They're not waiting on us, right?” Molica says, explaining how reconciliation could sometimes take three or four hours per vendor. 

The next step for the company’s Payables test will involve using it to pay non-vendors, like the electric, water, and internet bills.

“This might be the most efficient thing we do all year,” Molica says. “I don't think about bills anymore. I don't have to worry about writing checks. I don't have to worry about signing checks. I know bills are paid. I can go in there and look at everything that's been paid for the month. It's way easier.”

Payables allows customers to track all pending payments and know exactly when funds are received by the vendor.

Payables optimizes plumbing business workflows to better scale for growth

Molica says Payables probably saves him 20 hours of labor per month on reconciliations alone. It also allows Tony’s Plumbing to adjust for vendor credits or discounts before running a final statement or reconciling the accounts. 

“We do have vendor credits. When you do it in QuickBooks, I know there's a way to set it up, but we've never really got it to work perfectly,” Molica says. “Mom always had to go in and tweak things, and she would usually do one big credit, so it was never really that accurate.

“Now with ServiceTitan, you get your chance to run all your credits right there before you reconcile,” he adds. “We literally hold the statement, we run down the list, and just make sure it matches. If it doesn't, we can just quickly do our adjustments.

“When we did our first one, we actually had issues with the credits. And I think we resolved it in about three minutes,” Molica says. “The credits is probably one of the bigger efficiencies as well.”

While plumbing remains the company’s core trade, Molica says he and his brother envision operating a multi-service company in the future. For now, they’d like to organize the current business, publish an operations manual by the end of the year, and maybe grow by 15%.

“My big goal is how much stuff can my brother and I take out of our brains and let other people completely handle,” Molica says. “And that's what Payables brought to this process. 

“Every time you have to move (away from ServiceTitan) to a new program, you're taking something away. And Payables coordinates everything together. It brings that visibility back to it, and it makes it simpler for your employees.

“Payables is just simple,” he adds. 

» As a core accounting feature of ServiceTitan, Payables is available at no additional cost. Fill out our form and book a demo with our Payables specialists today.