Money matters

In Commercial, most companies have a formal invoicing process outside of the technician simply collecting payment while on site. In most cases, collecting payment on site in a commercial environment is just not possible.  

In ServiceTitan, technicians do not have to email invoices directly to the customer from the field.  In fact, most of our Commercial contractors discourage it. Commercial companies typically use the batching, posting, and exporting process in ServiceTitan to ensure that the invoices are sent properly to the customer, with no errors and no need to reprocess invoices at the end of a payment term cycle.  

A solid invoicing workflow also reduces mistakes. 

“With ServiceTitan, the room for error in invoicing drops phenomenally,” Gonzales said. “As you're getting ready to batch, you can have a process where the dispatcher reviews it, then you have the manager review it, and then accounting looks at it. As they're getting ready to batch the invoice to QuickBooks, they send it to the customer. 

“And it allows you to do tags, too. I know we keep talking about tags, but we use them a lot. We even have a tag that says “billed.” 

“We know even if for some reason the email got entered incorrectly or somebody else opened it and deleted it, not knowing, we can say, ‘Well, this was billed, we do show it being received, but let's go ahead and dive a little deeper.’”

A solid invoicing workflow was better for Albuquerque Plumbing, and better for customers too. 

“One of the things that we were frustrated with before was the purchase orders,” Gonzales said. “For a commercial customer, the P.O.s wouldn’t show up on their invoice, and that's how they pay their bill. They would call and say, OK, you sent us an invoice, but we don't have the P.O., and that slows down the payment. 

ServiceTitan changed that. 

“The process now won’t allow an invoice to be sent without the P.O., so our aging is down,” Gonzales said. “Instead of never being paid for like 90 or 100 days, now I think we have three accounts that are as old as 90 days. And that’s it.

“ServiceTitan allows you to track it, allows you to see all of the invoicing steps. You're able to collect the money, make sure it's accurate on both the customer and your side, and make sure you're charging for all the materials you should be. 

“It’s been a game changer for us.”

After a job is created in ServiceTitan, an invoice is considered “pending”. The technician can go out to the job, complete work, have the invoice reviewed by  the person in charge of commercial billing to make sure that the requirements that the customer has have been met.  

The customer may get a special discount or they may require a certain identification number on the invoice or ensure the correct tax rate is applied. For now, this is a manual process in ServiceTitan, but we have plans to automate it).  

The completed invoices appear on the accounting screen.

Here  is a link on how to make sure the customer PO is searchable and transfers to the invoice. 

• Customer PO

After ensuring that the invoice is ready, it should be sent to the customer before Batching, Posting, and Exporting. That way, as the invoice is mailed out (either via email or standard mail), the employee responsible for the invoicing can batch the invoices one at a time, to make sure none fall through the cracks. 

Think about Batching, Posting and Exporting this way:

• Batching your invoices is like placing all of them in an envelope for that day. 

• Posting seals the envelope.

• Exporting is mailing the envelope to your accounting software. 

• Once in your accounting software, the envelope is opened and organized based on your system. 

After the invoice is mailed out,  follow the standard process for batching, posting and exporting.  A link to a Knowledge Base article on how to batch, post and export can be found below:

https://help.servicetitan.com/Content/Invoicing/overview-invoicing-process.htm

If you find you need to adjust or correct an invoice after it has been posted. Take accountability for the mistake and assure the customer you are updating your process to make sure the mistake does not happen again. Get with your team and make the necessary adjustments.  

Here is the link to the Knowledge Base article to walk you through this process.  Creating an Adjustment Invoice.