Know Your Numbers
Invoicing, reporting, and the question most owners can't answer quickly: what's actually happening in the business right now?
Invoicing takes a few hours a week. Reporting takes a couple more, and mostly consists of someone rebuilding the same spreadsheet from the same three sources.
The deeper version: ask an owner what their close rate was last quarter, or which job type actually makes money, or how many customers lapsed, and the answer is a pause and then a guess. Not because they're careless — because pulling it would take an afternoon and there's never an afternoon.
Less than you'd think in hours, more than you'd think in decisions.
The labor is countable and usually modest — five hours a week of admin at a loaded rate is around $10,000 a year, and for a lot of businesses that's roughly what it should cost at your size. We say that plainly because it's true, and because this is the section we most often tell people to leave alone.
The real cost is decisions made on feel. If you don't know which job type carries margin, you price on instinct. If you don't know your close rate, you can't tell whether a slow month is demand or execution. That's not a line item. It's just every choice being slightly worse than it needed to be.
The recurring admin work stops consuming a person. Invoices go out on completion, not on a billing day.
And the questions you currently can't answer quickly get answered quickly: what closed, what didn't, what's overdue, what's actually profitable. Not a dashboard nobody opens — the three or four numbers that would actually change what you do next week.
Invoicing and collection
Fires off job completion. Follow-up on unpaid invoices runs on a schedule instead of on someone's discomfort with making the call.
Reporting
The spreadsheet rebuild stops. The numbers assemble themselves from where they already live.
Data cleanup
Frequently the real work, and unglamorous. If your customer records are in three places and disagree, everything downstream — reactivation, dispatch, reporting — is degraded by it. This is often the thing to fix before the thing you came here for.
Fit with your stack
QuickBooks, Xero, whatever you're on: we read from it. Nobody needs a new accounting system, and if we suggest one, ask us why.
Depends almost entirely on how clean the data is. If it's tidy, reporting is a short project. If it's scattered across systems that disagree, the cleanup is the project and the reporting is the easy part after.
This is the section we most often score
SOLIDand tell people not to touch.
If you're invoicing from the field and getting paid same-day, you're already ahead of most operations your size. Whatever budget you have probably belongs in Convert instead.
We'd rather say that now than take the work.