3 Easy Ways to Save Time With Your Plumbing & Heating Business
Many trades business owners know the feeling of having a someone surprised at how ‘high’ their prices are. You must be earning a killing, right?
Of course, the part they’re forgetting about is all the (unpaid) work that goes on behind the scenes. Jobs may bring in the money, but there’s also all the scheduling, paperwork, accounts — all the tedious and time-consuming things often labelled the ‘necessary evil’ of running a trades business.
The good news is that there are ways to dramatically reduce the time you spend on these types of tasks.
Using software to automate them means you get to spend more time on what you want — whether that be growing the business or getting your evenings and weekends back.
In this article, we’ll go over 3 things every plumbing and heating business can easily automate with software.
Part 1: Organising your paperwork & job records
Every job you complete has a collection of paperwork – maybe even a quote, certificate, invoice, and job sheet for just a single one.
As a business, you need to keep these records for around 6 years. Making sure records get back to the office and manually organising and filing them away is a huge job in itself. That’s before you find out you need to go back and find a specific record for a customer because they’ve misplaced theirs…
Going digital completely removes this part of your workflow. Not only is everything accessible from your phone, it’s all done automatically in the background.
For example, on Gas Engineer Software, any record created is tied to a customer, job address, and job. You can use our quick search feature to quickly find records and a complete job history is kept for you to reference.
Records on Gas Engineer Software are stored safely on the cloud with bank-level encryption and regular backups.
Part 2: Reminders
For quotes & invoices
Customers taking ages to follow up on a quote or pay their bill — we’re sure you know the struggle. Following up with them might nudge things along, but it’s not exactly the perfect solution when you have to spend hours upon hours sorting through to find out which quotes or invoices need chasing.
Unfortunately, these delays can have very real consequences for your business: Not following up on quotes can mean losing a job to a competitor, and late payments are a pain for keeping a steady cash flow.
However, if you’ve done your paperwork on Gas Engineer Software, it can do all of this for you. For example, it’ll know when an invoice hasn’t been paid and send out a reminder email to your customer (that you can pre-write).
For servicing
Annual service reminders are one of the most effective ways for heating and plumbing businesses to get more work. If done manually, you’ve got to keep detailed records and have a way to see which of your customers has an upcoming service due.
But for software, this is a simple task. To remind customers one month in advance, it simply needs to sort through your record history, filter those done 11 months ago, and send a quick message.
This all happens in the background as you carry on with work on the tools and other important tasks. In a way, automating these reminders creates a self-feeding model for your business through work for existing customers.
Part 3: Data entry
Good bookkeeping is essential for a successful trades business. But with so many income and expense streams, it can quickly become a tedious process.
Most businesses now use some kind of accounting software for easy bookkeeping and compliance. The trouble here is that you (or your accountant) have to manually enter all your data into this software line by line.
If you use a platform that integrates with your accounting software system, you’ll be able to automatically sync across customer info and all your earnings. This makes the whole process quicker, easier, and free of mistakes.
There’s more ways you can save time
Gas Engineer Software offers a complete workflow solution purpose-built for heating and plumbing companies.
If you want to find out how the whole process works, click here. We’ve also got lots of information about creating records and certificates, handling your invoices, and even how automated reminders work.
Alternatively, you could jump straight into a free trial. No card details are required, and you get to access every single feature for the entire duration.
Gas Engineer Software is 100% free to try.
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