From paper job sheetto invoice.
The work is done on Tuesday and the invoice goes out nine days later. Where those days go, what gets lost along the way, what replaces it, and the one number that tells you whether this happens to you too.
Done on Tuesday. Invoiced nine days later.
Take one job sheet and follow it. Not a particular customer's sheet, but the route a sheet travels in many field service teams.
An engineer finishes a callout on Tuesday afternoon. He writes down the hours, notes which parts went in, has the customer sign, and puts the sheet on the dashboard. The work is done, and everything you might want to know about it is known at that moment.
From then on nothing happens to that work for a week and a half, other than it passing from hand to hand. The sheet rides along in the van, reaches the office on Friday, sits on a pile on Monday, gets retyped on Tuesday and goes out as an invoice on Thursday.
Of those nine days, one had anything to do with the work. The rest is transport, piles and retyping. And at every handover something can drop out: an hour nobody remembers precisely, a part that was never booked off, a signature that turns into an argument later.
Where a sheet spends its week.
Five moments, one of which is about the work.
What is not happening meanwhile
The office does not know the work is finished, the van stock no longer matches, and the planner only sees next week that this callout took longer than scheduled.
The work is done
The engineer writes hours and materials on the sheet and has the customer sign. This is the only moment at which everything is complete and fresh.
The sheet reaches the office
For three days it rides along in the van. Anyone who wants to know sooner whether the job is finished calls the engineer and interrupts the next one.
It sits on a pile
Along with the sheets from the other engineers. The order is the order they were handed in, not the order of what should be invoiced first.
Someone retypes it
Hours into time tracking, materials off the van stock, notes into the customer record. Illegible handwriting turns into a phone call.
The invoice goes out
Nine days after the work. The customer remembers someone came, but not exactly what was done, so questions come back more often.
What gets lost on the way.
Nothing spectacular, but it happens every week, and in four places at once.
Hours nobody remembers
What is on the sheet is what the engineer recalled at the end of the day. The quarter of an hour waiting for a key and the extra trip to the wholesaler rarely make it.
Materials never booked off
The parts have left the van, but the stock in the system only learns about it once someone retypes the sheet. Until then the planner orders on figures that are wrong.
Sign-off you cannot stand behind
A scribble on paper is fine until there is a dispute about what exactly was agreed. Then there is no timestamp, no name and no photo of the situation.
Invoicing that waits on a pile
Every day between the work and the invoice is a day you are financing your own work, and a day in which the customer forgets more of the visit.
What replaces it.
The same sheet, captured at the moment everything still adds up. The rest follows from that.
Captured where it happens
Hours, materials, photos and a signature with a time and a name, on the phone the engineer is already holding. One guided flow, not a form across three screens.
Stock that matches straight away
What leaves the van leaves the stock. The reorder list fills itself, so the next engineer does not find an empty shelf.
The office knows the same day
The planner sees that the work is done and how long it took, without calling. Overruns are visible while there is still something to be done about them.
A draft invoice, waiting
As soon as the sheet is approved, the invoice is waiting in the accounts. Someone looks at it and sends it; nobody retypes it.
And what it does not need.
Four assumptions that make this kind of work slow and expensive, and that do not apply here.
No new platform
Your planning, your accounts and your stock stay where they are. What we build makes the connection; it replaces nothing your team already handles well.
No tablet nobody takes along
It runs on the phone the engineer already carries, and it keeps working when there is no signal in a crawl space.
No form across three screens
The more fields there are, the less gets filled in. We ask only for what genuinely helps planning, stock and invoicing along.
No big bang
Start with one type of job: callouts, or planned maintenance instead. What works there you extend, and what does not has cost little.
What to measure, and what it is not about
There is one number that sums up this whole story: the time between finished work and sent invoice. Take your last ten sheets, put two dates next to them, and you have it. Three others follow straight after: how many sheets come back because something was missing, how often the van stock turned out to be wrong, and how many phone calls it took to find out whether a job was done.
Measure them for a month before anything changes. Without that baseline the improvement will only exist as a feeling, and the conversation ends up being about whether it helped instead of about what the next step is.
What it is not about. If the sheets arrive late because there are too few engineers, software will not fix that. And if nobody at the office has time to check a draft invoice, the pile simply moves from paper to screen. This works when the retyping is the bottleneck, and not when that retyping is the only moment of control you have.
More on this kind of workflow is on Technical field service, and the administrative side on Accounting & finance teams. If you want to know what something like this costs first, that is in the previous note, on what automating one process costs.
Take your last ten sheets. That tells us enough.
Two dates per sheet and we can say whether there is anything to gain here. Within 48 hours you have a written scope with the number of modules and a fixed price.