Invoice Koi

Invoicing for plumbers

Plumbing bills in two shapes and they fight each other. There is the emergency (a call-out, an hour, a part off the van) and there is the install, quoted weeks ahead and paid in stages. Doing both out of the same notebook is how a £40 part ends up unbilled.

An illustration of a pipe wrench, copper elbows, a blowtorch, a pressure gauge and a roll of tape, with a koi swimming among them.
01On the document

What plumbers
put on an invoice.

These go in your price book once, with your own prices against them. After that a line is one tap: the item, the description, the unit and the price fill themselves, and the totals resolve underneath.

LineUnit
Plumbing labourhrs
Call-out, standard hourseach
Call-out, out of hourseach
Boiler serviceeach
Parts and fittingsjob
Bathroom installationdays

Prices are yours. Invoice Koi ships a handful of round placeholder lines to start from and never fills your book with figures you did not set.

A job, grouped Subtotals per section
CALL-OUT
Call-out, out of hours£145
Plumbing labour£210
Subtotal£355
PARTS
Pump, replacement£385
Valves and fittings£95
Subtotal£480
MAKE GOOD
Plumbing labour£140
Subtotal£140
Total£975
Grouped line items are free, on all nine templates.
A photograph of a plumber standing at the kitchen sink he has been working under, phone in one hand.
Price book
Plumbing labourhrs
Call-out, standard hourseach
Call-out, out of hourseach
One tap puts the line on the invoice.
This job, grouped
CALL-OUT£355
PARTS£480
MAKE GOOD£140
Total£975
No signal needed. It is written here.
02Why plumbers use it

Three things that
save the evening.

Photograph the merchant receipt in the car park

Merchant, amount, tax and category come off the paper. The photograph is filed against the job either way, so the parts you paid for at eight in the morning are on the invoice at six.

Annual services that invoice themselves

Set a boiler service to repeat weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, and the next one is drafted and waiting rather than remembered.

Out-of-hours priced as out-of-hours

Keep a standard call-out and an out-of-hours call-out as two lines in the price book, and pick the right one at eleven at night without doing arithmetic.

03 · Questions

Asked by plumbers.

Can I add parts at cost to a plumbing invoice?

Yes. Keep a "Parts and fittings" line in your price book priced at zero and set the figure per job, or scan the merchant receipt and put the real number on it.

Can it handle emergency call-out rates?

Keep both call-outs as separate lines in the price book. Tapping the right one fills the description and the price, so an out-of-hours job is never billed at the daytime rate by accident.

How do I take a deposit on a bathroom install?

Record what the customer has paid against the invoice as it comes in. The balance, the status and every report figure follow from the payments you record, so a part-paid invoice shows what is still owed.

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