Free Subcontractor Invoice Template: Streamline Your Invoicing Process to Get Paid on Time and in Full

It’s very difficult to have an accurate, efficient invoicing process without a standardized means of billing. And for that purpose, a contractor invoice template can be helpful for providing standardized formatting and a professional look to their invoices. It also allows contractors to ensure their employees collect and document the information needed to execute billing and obtain payment.

As such, we’ve created a professional invoice template that’s free for subcontractors to leverage in their business. In the next section of this article, we’ll explain how to download and use it. 

But while a subcontractor invoice form is a good first step for contractors looking to better organize this key aspect of their operation, a PDF-based template ultimately isn’t going to solve the deeper, process-related issues that surround invoicing for subcontracting work.  

For example:

• Accurately job costing throughout the course of a project.

• Calculating and tracking progress billing.

• Creating applications for payment at each stage of a payment schedule.

• Keeping continuation sheets up to date with the latest labor hours and purchase order data.

• Defending invoices when general contractors or customers disagree with what’s being invoiced.

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Even when used in conjunction with tools like Microsoft Excel, Google docs, Google sheets, or other invoicing software solutions, a blank invoice template does little to help subcontractors navigate these frequent challenges.

In this article, we’ll explain how construction management software for subcontractors can improve their invoicing process, while also solving these other core issues that surround invoicing.

Below we’ll cover:

• How to download and use our customizable invoice template.

• The challenges of managing subcontractor invoicing that a template alone can’t solve.

• How ServiceTitan’s features address these challenges and more.

Want to see ServiceTitan in action? Schedule a call with us to learn more about how our software can streamline your entire business operation, from job costing, invoicing, and payroll, to scheduling, reporting, accounting, and more. 

How to Download and Use Our Subcontractor Invoice Template

The invoice template we’ve created for you includes the standardized fields that invoices contain when they’re generated in ServiceTitan.

Specifically:

• Billing address and job address

• Invoice number and date

• Payment terms and due date

• Line items, prices, quantities, and total balances due

Then, customize it with your company’s information, and each time you create an invoice, you can hit “Save As” to create a copy for your customer and preserve your template.

But as we mentioned above, the utility of a PDF template is very limited. In the next section, we’ll discuss the process-related challenges with subcontractor invoicing that a template alone won’t solve.

The Challenges of Subcontractor Invoicing That a Template Alone Can’t Solve

Fundamentally, the information that gets presented on a subcontractor invoice is based on job costing — showing where you are today with your actual expenses and your actual billing versus your budgeted expenses.

Staying on top of job costing is what allows subcontractors to maintain profitability, create defensible applications for payment, and accurately bill customers at each stage of a payment schedule.

However, for most subcontractors — especially small businesses or those using cobbled together solutions of spreadsheets and other software that don’t seamlessly integrate with each other — managing this process can be laborious, time consuming, and fraught with inaccuracies.

Some of the top challenges subcontractors face when it comes to invoicing include:

1. Repetitively Pulling Data from Many Different Places

Maintaining accurate and up to date job costing requires pulling together data on labor hours, supplier purchase orders, change orders, and other expenses from disparate sources, and maintaining spreadsheets to track all of these expenses throughout the course of a project.

2. Errors From Manual Data Entry

Subcontractors who rely on spreadsheets to maintain their records often have to transfer data from one place to another to generate documents like invoices. This is a tedious, time-consuming process, and one that can easily result in costly errors.

Once the data on a spreadsheet has been compromised, it can no longer be relied upon to furnish the kind of detailed, accurate documentation that progress billing demands, and fixing the underlying problems can often be a nightmarish complicated task. 

Plus, customers who receive applications for payment that are late or inaccurate are highly unlikely to make payment on time or in full. This can set up potentially expensive legal conflicts and cash-flow shortages. In the long run, it can hurt your credit as well.

3. Creating Applications for Payment and Continuation Sheets

At specific due dates throughout each payment cycle, subcontractors need to reflect their job costing information accurately in an application for payment, often including a continuation sheet that lists line items of everything being billed for during that payment period. 

Doing this manually is another resource intensive (and error prone) task that independent contractors need to repeatedly execute throughout a project.

Clearly, a free invoice template does absolutely nothing to help solve these challenges or improve efficiency in the job costing process, despite this being so fundamental to the process of generating accurate invoices. 

How ServiceTitan Helps Optimize the Subcontractor Invoicing Process

In contrast to the difficult approach described above, ServiceTitan makes progress billing easy by consolidating all of the information you need into one place.

Without having to pull data from a half-dozen different files, platforms, or drives, ServiceTitan users can quickly and efficiently plug in accurate numbers to answer questions like:

• How many techs were on-site last month, and for how many days?

• What materials and equipment were ordered, and at what cost?

• From which vendors were bills received and when? 

As shown in the screenshot above, ServiceTitan provides business owners with the complete picture of hours logged and overhead costs on a subcontracting job, so that contractors can bill properly against the total amount of the contract’s value. 

Progress billing is broken down according to line items, showing exactly how much of the forecast total for each item has been billed so far. That way, G.C.’s get a clear view of precisely where things stand, and the company doing the subcontracting can get paid fast, without a lot of unpleasant back and forth with their client.  

And the fact that ServiceTitan numbers are captured and reported in real-time provides a huge advantage. It guarantees that payroll data, work orders — and a whole lot more — are fully up to date when it’s time to put together an application for payment, so there’s no costly lags.  

Now let’s zoom in to see how invoices actually get built inside ServiceTitan.

Having completed a job or task, whoever’s responsible for creating an invoice can select an option from the toolbar to start building an invoice. 

Add a task, for instance, will open a customizable selection of pre-built services. An HVAC company’s menu might include items such as: Change TVX, Replace Capacitor, Replace HVAC Systems, Repair Heat Pump. 

The Job and Invoice Summary portions of the ticket will reflect the author’s selections. Certain basics — payroll date, hours worked, subtotal, tax zone, invoice date, terms, order number, invoice type, membership discounts — can be pre-populated by ServiceTitan. 

It’s tough to keep all of those details straight in the midst of a busy workday, and in our experience, this approach helps to ensure that the correct figures are used when computing the total cost for the invoice.   

Particularly for large, long-term subcontracting jobs, payors often require highly specific, detailed descriptions of work performed. That’s where our Summary section comes in. Here techs are prompted to fill in a comprehensive summary of what they’ve done and the expected outcome. By making sure their employees pay close attention to this part of the ticket, business owners can limit the questions and complaints they get from customers.  

In some cases, general contractors actually demand that subcontractors submit requests for payment using a specific form. But the contractors we work with find that in these cases, it’s easy to transfer information from their ServiceTitan account to the G.C.’s form — especially since they can be sure that their ServiceTitan data is accurate.

Another major advantage of using ServiceTitan is the ability to leverage our photo and video features through our Mobile app. 

With these capabilities, techs can make a record of jobs sites before, during, and after a project or task, giving customers definite evidence of their work and a clear sense of the benefits it will provide. Using our annotation tool, techs and managers can annotate photos to show problem areas and notable enhancements. 

With ServiceTitan’s subcontractor billing features, a single set of inputs simultaneously generates an internal invoice, which is logged and integrated with the accounting portion of the platform — more on our Quickbooks integration here — while a customer-facing application for payment, like the one above, gets delivered to subcontracting clients. 

Like ServiceTitan’s residential and commercial invoices, our application for payment documents are sleek and professional, complete with the subcontractor’s business name, contact information, the client’s name, and more. (Also like our residential and commercial invoices, our applications for payment are easily printable for you or your customer’s records.)

For standard commercial and residential jobs, ServiceTitan makes credit card, debit card, and PayPal payments easy. But for longer term subcontracting jobs, check or electronic bank transfer (ACH) are more common payment methods. When a payment comes in, it gets recorded in ServiceTitan and logged against the overall scope of the project.  

Conclusion

While a well-designed subcontractor invoice template can be a step in the right direction for service companies hoping to make a small incremental improvement, a PDF template generally won’t help them overcome the invoicing process challenges that can complicate contracting work. 

In fact, basic invoice templates can often mirror some of the same problems that create delays and loss of revenue for paper-based contracting businesses:

• Errors related to progress billing and application for payment.

• Disjointed business processes and data storage.

• Record-keeping, documentation, and communication problems.

As we’ve detailed in this article, for service business owners who truly want to optimize their subcontractor invoicing process by integrating it with their other core business functions — estimating, job costing, pricebook, and more — to drive growth, revenue, and efficiency, there’s no option that’s going to be more effective than a top-notch subcontractor software like ServiceTitan.

Want to see ServiceTitan in action? Schedule a call with us to learn more about how our software can streamline your entire business operation, from job costing, invoicing, and payroll, to scheduling, reporting, accounting, and more.