From a report to a paid invoice

Log it

A customer or tenant reports it with photos through a guided flow — or it comes from an inspection finding, a maintenance plan falling due, or staff raising it directly.

Either way it lands as a ticket on one board, not as a text thread on somebody's personal phone. There is no status dropdown anywhere in the flow: a request moves because someone did something to it, so the board is a description of where the work has got to rather than a list somebody has to keep tidy.

Nine stages, and not one of them is a field anybody edits.

Dispatch it

Assign a vetted contractor from your own roster, or post the job out to the wider network. Big-ticket work gets surveyed and quoted first, with the customer's approval on record before anyone is committed.

The booked slot locks on the team calendar, where every internal and external contractor has a lane of their own — standard hours, minus their booked time off and their assigned work.

Capacity counts who is actually free, not how many jobs are open.

Track it

The contractor works the job from their own portal — notes, photos, parts and time — and the office watches the clock rather than phoning to ask.

Work done with no signal queues on the phone and submits itself when the phone finds one, so a plant room in a basement is not a gap in the record.

The office stops chasing, because the evidence arrives as the work happens.

Bill it

A completed job becomes an invoice with no line item re-keyed. Membership credits and included callouts apply themselves. Payment runs on the organisation's own Stripe account, so the money never passes through ours.

The invoice is made of the visit rather than reconstructed from it.

Ask for the evidence before anyone drives over

The two-visit pattern — attend, diagnose, order the part, attend again — is mostly an information problem. Per service category you can ask the reporter for exactly what the visit will need: the data plate, an error code, a photo from the right angle, a yes or no about access.

The data plate goes on to the asset as make, model and serial, so the parts decision happens off-site. Nothing is blocked by a missing answer — an emergency goes out with whatever is known.

Turn the job that would have taken two visits into one.

The clock the customer can watch

The technician starts a visit and the office and the customer both see it running: time worked, how much of the callout's included hour is left, and what the additional time has come to so far.

It is the same arithmetic that produces the invoice, so staff answering “how much will this be?” mid-visit are reading a number rather than guessing at one, and the bill at the end is the figure everybody already watched being made.

Nobody is surprised by the invoice, because everybody watched it being made.

A sticker on the boiler that knows which boiler it is

Print a QR tag for an individual appliance. A tenant scans it and gets a report form that already knows the property and the unit — no address to type, nothing to describe.

Staff triaging it see the make, model, serial, install date, whether it is still under warranty, and every previous fault on that same unit, before deciding who to send.

The fault report arrives already knowing the appliance's history.

Price the parts as options, not as a new quote

Some jobs turn on which machine goes in. Send whoever pays a choice — this one at one price, that one at another — before anything is ordered. The labour already agreed stays exactly as agreed.

The chosen option is recorded against the job, so the invoice line names the machine that was actually fitted.

Nobody re-approves a callout they accepted last week because the part changed.