Contractors who invest in their service departments — and it is a substantial investment in both equipment and staff (wages and specialized training costs) — do so with an understanding that there can be a real payback resulting from this investment. Service departments carry larger than normal overhead costs because of the equipment-heavy nature of the department, but these higher costs should be offset by the expectation of larger material and labor margins than a pure fixed bid market would normally provide. Remember, we are not selling material or even labor, but rather we are selling a valuable commodity known as service. If we do it correctly, our service department will pay a relatively large share of the overall company’s overhead requirements, and will also help to enhance the company’s corporate image of professionalism and expertise, all based on what we do within this department.

The normal / traditional flow of service work would be as follows:

• A client calls in or one of our sales team makes arrangements with a client for work to be performed — this results in a work order being produced.
• This work order is then turned over to the service dispatcher.
• The dispatcher assigns the work order to a service technician and creates an appointment for this person to go to the client’s premises and perform the work.
• The urgency of the work would, of course, determine the priority of the appointment.
• The job information is given to the service technician.
• The service technician proceeds to the site, performs the work, and records the material and labor totals on the work order form.
• This is now a completed work order which is handed over to the service manager or invoicing clerk, hopefully within a day of the work being completed.
• The completed work order is converted to an invoice and sent to the client.
• The client promptly pays the bill and thanks us profusely for the excellent service provided.

This is the way it should work, and providing we perform our due diligence throughout the process, it actually does approach this ideal, at least some of the time. Our Time & Material Billing program provides contractors with the tools to make the due diligence process much simpler, and has been providing these tools for many years.

We use T&M Billing to produce, assign, and distribute work orders. We then take the completed work orders and create invoices from these completed work orders for a relatively efficient flow of information from work order conception to final billing.

Wireless communications are now the rule rather than the exception, so the system can be streamlined even further — enter the complete service management system. This optional system consists of Schedule & Dispatch — which enables us to schedule and dispatch resources electronically — and Remote WorkOrder (for the remote electronic completion of work orders by the service technician). The Schedule & Dispatch module interfaces with Version 10 of the T&M Billing program to seamlessly update information, including the provision of the materials lists and labor hours from the service technician’s completed work order. This can be done as soon as the dispatched work is complete and sent back to the Service & Dispatch module. The completed work order information is sent from the service technician’s mini notebook or laptop via the Remote WorkOrder program. This in turn sends the updated information to the T&M Billing program where an invoice can now be generated.

In service work, it is a fact that promptly invoiced work tends to be paid quicker and with less negative client feedback than work when billing is delayed. The further in time that we get from the completion of a job, the dimmer the client’s memory becomes of the real value of that job, so our aim is to get the invoice to the client as quickly as possible once the work is complete.

Be sure to check out this new approach to a complete service solution. You may just find that T&M Billing combined with Service & Dispatch plus Remote Work Order provides the final step you have been searching for to streamline dispatching and to finally get the completed work to billing cycle exactly where it needs to be, thus enhancing both profit levels and cash flow.

Remember that service tech who never managed to get the paper work done promptly? Regardless of the lecturing, nagging, and threatening, it was always a battle to actually get him into any kind of compliance. Well, he should now be a thing of the past, assuming, of course that he doesn’t lose his new mini notebook.

Illustration by Angelo Katsaros