The How to series · Post 16
Job paperwork: certs, photos, invoices
For UK trades owners with a small team: paperwork adds about 45 minutes per finished job, and most of it lands at 9pm when nobody is counting.
It's 4pm on a Tuesday. The second job of the day signs off and the customer is happy. The paperwork hasn't started. A cert photographed on a phone. Before-and-after photos buried somewhere in a camera roll. An invoice that won't exist until after tea, if the day behaves. The customer's copy is wherever the last one went.
The job finishes on site. The paperwork finishes at the kitchen table at 9pm. Nobody plans it that way. That's just when the day finally leaves room for it.
That's the loop this post is about: job paperwork. Certs, photos, invoices and job notes travelling from the van to the office to the customer to wherever they get filed, which is never the same place twice.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
- 45 minutes of paperwork per finished job (photos found and named, the cert copied across, the invoice typed, the pack emailed)
- × 4 jobs a week = 3 hours a week
- × £30 an hour = £90 a week
- × 46 working weeks = about £4,140 a year
A two-van firm where both engineers handle their own paperwork? Double it. And look at when the work actually happens: not in a quiet 45-minute slot, but at night, competing with everything else an evening is for. That's why it never shows up in anyone's sense of the week. It's a second shift, unpaid and uncounted.
Score it: the three checks
The same three checks we use everywhere:
- Hours. How much of the week it eats (0 to 5)
- Repeat. Could a new starter follow it from one page? (0 to 5)
- Risk-if-wrong. If it slips once, how bad? (0 to 5. High means the rules are obvious and a slip is recoverable)
Job paperwork scores Hours 4 (three hours a week, plus the evenings on top), Repeat 5 (the cert goes here and the invoice comes off the job sheet, with the photos named to match: it fits on one page), Risk-if-wrong 4 (a misnamed photo is annoying, and an invoice drafted for the wrong job is caught the moment a person looks before sending).
Three checks at 4 or more: hand it over. The pack assembles itself from the job, and the invoice is drafted and waiting when you're back in signal. A person approves whatever actually goes out.
Try one thing this week (free)
Tonight, time one job's paperwork on your phone's stopwatch, from getting back into the van to the invoice sent. Write the minutes down where you'll see them. Do it again on Thursday.
Judge it on Friday: the two times added together, times your hourly rate. Most owners who time this once stop debating whether it's a problem and start asking what it would take to hand it over.
Where a person stays
Photos, certs and job notes drop into one place as they happen, and the paperwork assembles from there. The invoice is prepared by software and decided by a person, every time. Invoices are money, so they stay approval-only. Certificates stay approval-only too: anything compliance-shaped never sends without a human looking at it. The van-to-office run is exactly the kind of work that hands over well, because it repeats and there's a right answer. The checking stays with you.
FAQ
A hire moves the evening work to somebody else's evening and costs hire money every year. The maths of a hire vs an automation is its own post. The short version: keep a person on the checking, and give the assembling to software.
Good, that's the raw material. The loop that eats the evening starts after the sheet: photos off the phone, the cert to the office, the invoice out, the customer's copy sent. Filling in the sheet was never the expensive part.
Not through anything with approval-first in it. The pack is assembled and then it waits. A person looks before it sends, which takes a minute and catches the mistakes.
It holds the job, and that part helps. What eats the evening is the movement between systems: phone to office to customer to filing, with the invoice somewhere in the middle. Generic tools are good at holding data. The second shift is the moving.
In one place the business owns, organised by job, as plain files. If the setup ended tomorrow, the files go with you. That's no lock-in as a design decision, not a line on a sales page.