Late in September I sat down with a security installer who works on his own near Geelong. He's been in the trade a long time and runs Xero and ServiceM8. He's moving towards bigger commercial work, things like body corporates and multi-unit installs, and he asked for a workflow audit so the office side was sorted before the jobs got larger. That's a smart time to do it.
His installs were fine. Where money was leaking out was the small charges that repeat.
Three charges that kept slipping
He supplies a couple of dozen sites with 4G modems and SIM cards. His supplier bills him monthly, and he bills his clients quarterly. So at any point he's carrying around two months of cost for other people's connections.
He also on-charges a cloud portal from one of the security brands to a few dozen clients once a year. None of that was set up as a recurring invoice. Every renewal got raised by hand, when he remembered.
The third was monthly patrol billing. He worked it out per job from a template. It got done, but only when he sat down and did the sums each month.
When we added it up together, his own estimate was a few thousand dollars sitting unbilled across the SIM and cloud services. He didn't lose that on any one job. It crept up a renewal at a time.
This happens heaps when you run a business on your own. The big jobs get your attention, and the small repeat ones quietly fall through.
Put recurring charges in Xero
What I recommended was moving every repeating charge into recurring invoices in Xero, with automatic payment where the client agrees to it.
I'd put these in Xero rather than ServiceM8 because there's no job attached. Nobody's going to site. ServiceM8 is built around jobs, and it's good at that. A SIM card that renews every month belongs in the accounts package that's already sending his invoices.
Once a recurring invoice is set up, it goes out on schedule whether he's on a roof or on holiday. He can also match the billing cycle to what his supplier charges him, so he stops funding two months of other people's data.
If you're weighing up job software for a trade business, our ServiceM8 vs Tradify guide covers what each one handles well, and how we set up ServiceM8 explains where it fits with Xero.
Charging for the five-minute jobs
The other leak was remote work. Clients ring him to void a lost access card, set up an app or share intercom access. Each one takes a few minutes, and he was doing all of it for free because he had no way to charge for it.
A few minutes, many times a month, across dozens of clients, adds up to real hours. We talked about formalising a remote support plan, either per session or as a capped monthly plan, so those calls end up as a line on an invoice.
What to take from this
If you've got any repeating charge in your business (data, monitoring, software licences, maintenance visits), I'd list them all on one page this week and check each one has a recurring invoice behind it. The stuff you do once a month or once a year is much easier to forget than the big job you quoted last week. Our get paid page covers the rest of the invoicing side.