How to Create a Customer Statement: A Guide for Heating and Plumbing Businesses

A customer statement is a single document listing every invoice on a customer’s account: the dates, the amounts, what’s been paid and what’s still outstanding. You’ll also see it called an invoice statement or a statement of account, and they’re functionally the same thing.

For account customers like landlords and letting agents, it replaces digging out months of separate invoices every time someone asks what they owe. This guide covers when to send one, what belongs on it, and how to generate one quickly.

When you need a customer statement

Where an invoice requests payment for one job, a statement summarises an account. It doesn’t replace your invoices, and it isn’t a fresh demand for payment. The best way to think of it is a summary of invoices you’ve already issued.

Most domestic customers won’t need a statement. When you finish the job, you generate an invoice and (generally) they pay on the spot/same day.

Statements earn their place when a customer has a running account with you across several jobs. Some examples include:

• Landlords with more than one property
• Letting and managing agents – Read more about the pros and cons of working with letting agents.
• Housing associations and local authorities
• Facilities management and commercial contracts
• Builders and main contractors you subcontract for

What these have in common is that the person paying wasn’t the person on site. They’re checking your invoices against their own records before they release anything.

A customer statement has the whole account on it and removes the most common reason for payment delays or mix-ups.

What to put on a customer statement

A statement should answer three questions without the reader doing any maths: what did you invoice, what have they paid, and what’s left to pay.

Like an invoice, start with your business details and VAT number, then who the statement is addressed to, the date you generated it, and the period it covers. After that, a line for every invoice.

Finish with the totals: total invoiced, total paid, total outstanding, and remember to put your bank details at the bottom.

Here’s an example created with GES:

The statement should look like the rest of your paperwork. If your invoices carry your logo and your terms, your statements should too. In Gas Engineer Software, the statement uses the same template as your invoices, so it picks up your branding without any extra setup.

See the full guide: How to invoice a heating & plumbing job.

The multi-property problem

An agent managing thirty properties is one customer with thirty job addresses. Across a year, you might raise forty invoices against them: a service at one property, a breakdown at another, a certificate somewhere else.

In short, the job address has to appear on every line; otherwise, the statement becomes a confusing mess. A system like GES that keeps job addresses linked to the customer record makes this an easy task.

How often to send them

This largely depends on the type of customer you’re working with and what arrangement you have.

You could send a customer statement monthly if you’re completing a steady flow of work for them.

Otherwise, customer statements can be sent on request.

How to generate a customer statement quickly

By hand, this means opening every invoice, copying figures into a spreadsheet, checking payments against your bank, then formatting the result. On an account with forty invoices, that’s not a small task.

To create a customer statement, you need to have every invoice to hand along with how much (if any) has been paid.

• Add your company and customer details to the statement
• Record the statement period
• Check the payment status of each invoice (paid, unpaid, or partially paid)
• Record each invoice in that statement period, with an address and payment status
• Total it all up
• Add your bank details

The alternative is to use a job management system like GES. If all your invoices are created and tracked in one system, everything is already connected to the customer record, and it’s a matter of pressing “generate”.

Here’s how to create one with GES:

• Open the customer and choose Generate Statement.
• Pick the period. Either set a start and end date, or tick to include all invoice data, which runs from their earliest invoice through to today.
• Check the PDF. Payments recorded against each invoice appear underneath it with the date, so a part-paid invoice shows its history rather than just a balance.

Sending your customer statement

Here’s a template email you can use when sending your customer statement. In GES, there’s a template you can edit in your email template settings. Set it up once, and it’s used every time, with tags that pull in the customer’s name, your company name and your phone number, so you’re not retyping it every month.

Click here for a step-by-step guide to sending customer statements in GES. 

Using GES as your all-in-one heating business platform

Create all your invoices on GES, and everything falls into place. Payment reminders go out automatically to chase late-paying customers, payments can be taken on-site without a card terminal, it’s easy to keep track of payments, and customer statements can be generated at the click of a button when you need them.

All of this is noted down under the customer history in case you ever need to go back to reference the job.

GES is completely free to try for 14 days. No card is needed, and free live demos are available for everyone. Click here to start your free trial.