The engineer is at the customer’s site and the part is back at the office. Nobody pays for that second trip.
In an installation business you earn your money on engineer hours at the customer’s. Everything around that costs money: driving, searching, phoning, waiting for a part nobody had set aside. The planning often lives in the head of one work planner and on a board on the wall. When that person is off sick, the whole company notices. Automation helps here not by replacing engineers, but by stopping them from searching and retyping.
An installation company with 15 to 60 engineers, a service department and a work planner who schedules everything on a whiteboard.
Sound familiar?
- The engineer is at the customer’s site and is missing one part. He drives back, or the customer waits until next week.
- Job sheets come in on paper or as a photo; the hours are retyped in the evening, or not until Friday.
- Fault reports come in by phone, WhatsApp and info@, and are nowhere on a single list.
- A service contract expires or an inspection has lapsed, and nobody notices until the customer brings it up.
- The quote for a renovation is an afternoon of fiddling in Excel; material prices are months old.
- The customer calls: “what time is the engineer coming?” The answer is a phone call to the van.
- Nobody knows exactly what a job really cost. The job costing never gets done.
What usually runs here
That does not have to go. We build in between and around it.
Where the gains are
Materials on the van in advance
A materials list per job is generated from the job sheet and comparable jobs from your own history. The work planner approves, the warehouse sets it aside.
fewer second trips and fewer jobs that stall halfwayDigital job sheet with time booking
The engineer starts and stops his task in an app, books materials and takes photos. Everything lands straight in your software package, without retyping.
hours are correct the same day and invoices go out fasterFault reports from every channel on one list
Fault reports from email, phone notes and WhatsApp are read, summarised and set up as a task with customer, address and urgency.
no more fault report left sitting in a mailboxKeeping track of contracts and inspections
The system tracks contract terms, maintenance visits and inspection dates and sets up a task or a customer email in good time.
maintenance gets planned instead of forgotten, and contracts don’t quietly expireFaster quote costing
For a request, the system proposes a costing based on comparable jobs and current material prices. The estimator checks and adjusts.
quotes go out faster and are backed by what previous jobs actually cost youJob costing without extra work
Because hours and materials are booked at source, you see per job what really went into it and how that compares with the quote.
you see which type of work delivers margin and which work you should price differentlyThe honest bit
- A digital job sheet stands or falls with use in the van. If it takes more taps than the paper slip, or doesn’t work with gloves on, nobody uses it. That’s why we build it with the engineers.
- The materials list is a proposal based on your past. For genuinely new work it remains guesswork, and then your work planner’s experience is irreplaceable.
- The biggest gain usually isn’t in clever AI but in boring integration work: hours, materials and invoicing that finally talk to each other. That’s less exciting and often delivers the most.
How we start
We start with a core session: a half-day of four hours for €596 excluding VAT and travel costs, at the office and in the workshop. We follow one job from fault report to invoice and count the actions that add nothing. That produces a short list of what costs the most and what is quickest to fix. Usually we then tackle the job sheet and time booking first, because that’s where you see the difference within a few weeks.
Further reading
From our insights
Most businesses start with the tool and then get stuck. It is better to start with one piece of work that comes back every week and nobody enjoys.
The build costs are usually the easiest part of the bill. The surprises are in the clean-up beforehand, the monthly usage and the maintenance afterwards.