Plumbing/heating (SHK)
The work is in the pipes, the money is in the material. What breaks the invoice is rarely the working hour — it is what you take out of the van.
How it is billed
A boiler swap goes as a lump sum, a breakdown call by the hour, the annual service at your own rate. On top of that: the trip out, small parts, disposal of the old unit, and a surcharge for a night call. Every one of those lines has its own unit, so your quote and your invoice read the way you calculate in the van, not the way an office spreadsheet does. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions run lengths and room areas, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from.
What gets lost in the paperwork
Material is 40 to 55 percent of the job value — the single biggest item on the whole bill. And usually the one nobody can tie to a particular job: every wholesaler uses a different invoice format, different numbers and different names for the same elbow. The second thing is the small call-outs. An hour on Tuesday, a seal and two fittings out of the van — and none of it reaches an invoice, because by Friday nobody remembers.
Do the math yourself
Take last month. How many times did you drive out just to have a look? How many times did you take a part out of the van without noting it anywhere? Count the trips alone — at your rate, not somebody else’s. Then multiply by twelve. The material that left your store and never came back on an invoice, you bought with your own money.
Five minutes a day
You load the parts catalogue once — with the file from your own wholesaler, no retyping. A small call-out you close without a quote, straight as a job. Then in the evening: hours onto the job, material out of the store onto the same job, a photo of the receipt for whatever you bought on the way. The material price is frozen at the moment it leaves the store, so your job cost will not shift when the wholesaler raises prices tomorrow.
What it watches for you
Working for a main contractor, the program sets the reverse charge under §13b itself — and draws the line the authorities draw: a repair over €500 net is a construction service, a plain service inspection only if parts were replaced. It also watches your §48b certificate: without it your client must withhold 15 percent and pay it to the tax office. Your people’s hours go onto the job with night and Sunday premiums, and the client signs off the timesheet.
At the end of the year
Invoices issued, receipts collected and material booked out feed into the annual accounts and the VAT return without retyping. Reverse-charge invoices land in the right boxes on their own — the exact place where most mistakes happen.
The key is entering your data consistently...
