Invoice Koi

Invoicing for plumbers

Plumbing bills in two shapes and they fight each other. There is the emergency (a service call, 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 laborhrs
Service call, standard hourseach
Service call, after hourseach
Water heater serviceeach
Parts and fittingsjob
Bathroom remodeldays

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
SERVICE CALL
Service call, after hours$145
Plumbing labor$210
Subtotal$355
PARTS
Pump, replacement$385
Valves and fittings$95
Subtotal$480
MAKE GOOD
Plumbing labor$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 laborhrs
Service call, standard hourseach
Service call, after hourseach
One tap puts the line on the invoice.
This job, grouped
SERVICE CALL$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 supply house receipt in the parking lot

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

After hours priced as after hours

Keep a standard service call and an after-hours service call 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 service call rates?

Keep both service calls 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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