Sample · fictional business
Northline Plumbing & Heating — Business Snapshot
What I looked at
- Saturday morning on site, riding along on two service calls; interviews with the owner and the office manager
- 24 months of invoices (2,140 invoices, $1.31M), 612 customers, from QuickBooks Online
- Bills and card statements for software and phone; the scheduling whiteboard; the truck stock sheet
- Asked for and didn't get: the supplier price list (fine, it didn't change anything below)
The short version
The business is healthy. Work is steady, margins on service calls are good, and customers pay. The one thing that matters most: about $31,000 is sitting in invoices older than 45 days, and it's not because customers are slow, it's because invoices go out an average of 11 days after the job. Fix that and the cash problem in March goes away. Two smaller items below are worth a weekend. Everything else, leave alone.
Findings, ranked
Ranking is payoff divided by effort. Each one is something I saw in your data or your day.
1. Invoices go out 11 days after the job, and it's costing you about $2,900 a year plus a cash crunch every spring
- What I saw
- Median gap from job date to invoice date is 11 days (range 0–38). Invoices written on the same day as the job get paid in 19 days on average; invoices written a week or more later take 41. Right now $31,400 is over 45 days old, spread across 27 customers.
- What it's costing you
- You carry roughly $30k of your customers' money for an extra three weeks. At the rate on your line of credit (9.5%), that's about $2,900 a year in interest you pay because the invoice sat on the truck. The bigger cost is March, when you drew the line to make payroll while $28k was owed to you.
- What I'd do
- Techs already fill out a paper ticket on site. I'd have the office manager photograph the ticket at end of day and I'd build the piece that turns it into a QuickBooks invoice and emails or texts it to the customer that night. Nobody learns anything new; the ticket just gets photographed instead of filed.
- Effort
- Small. No habit change for the techs. One new habit for the office (photograph, don't file).
- Payoff
- $2,900/yr interest, fairly sure. Ending the March line draw: rough estimate, but that's the real prize.
2. You're paying for three scheduling tools and using a whiteboard
- What I saw
- Card statements show $89/mo for a field-service app (signed up 2024, 2 logins in the last year), $45/mo for a shared calendar add-on, and $30/mo for a texting service. The actual schedule lives on the whiteboard in the office, which works.
- What it's costing you
- $164/mo × 12 = $1,968 a year for software nobody uses.
- What I'd do
- Cancel all three. Keep the whiteboard. If you ever want the whiteboard to also text the customer the morning of, that's a separate small build, and it wouldn't need any of these.
- Effort
- Small. Three cancellations. I'll do them with you so nothing you rely on disappears.
- Payoff
- $1,968/yr, fairly sure (it's on the statements).
3. The office manager spends about four hours a week retyping supplier invoices
- What I saw
- Supplier invoices arrive as PDF email attachments and get typed line by line into QuickBooks. I timed six of them on Tuesday: 9 to 14 minutes each. Roughly 20 a week.
- What it's costing you
- ~4 hrs/week × 48 weeks × $26/hr loaded = about $5,000 a year of the office manager's time, spent on typing.
- What I'd do
- Build the piece that reads the PDF and drafts the QuickBooks bill for her to approve with one click. She keeps the final say; she just stops typing.
- Effort
- Medium. Depends on how consistent the suppliers' PDFs are; your top three suppliers are 80% of the volume and theirs are clean.
- Payoff
- $5,000/yr of time, rough estimate. Whether that turns into dollars depends on what she does with the four hours.
Things that are working — leave them alone
- The whiteboard. Everyone can read it from the door. Every software replacement I've seen for this is worse.
- Pricing. Your service-call margin is in the healthy range for the trade. Don't discount to win the big commercial bid you mentioned.
- Collections. Your customers pay. The delay is on your end, not theirs (finding #1).
What I'd do first
If you do nothing else: #2 this week (it's just cancellations), then #1. Together that's about $4,900 a year in hard dollars and, more importantly, no line-of-credit draw next March.
I can build the same-day invoicing piece (#1) for a fixed $3,200, quote attached. Or take this report and do it yourself; everything here is explained well enough to hand to someone.
… pages 3–6 follow: numbers behind the findings, software and subscriptions, process notes, data quality notes.