HVACBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

HVAC Billing Reports: What to Look at Each Week and Each Month

Billing software can produce a lot of numbers. Most owners do not need most of them. What they need is a short list of things to look at on a regular schedule, so problems show up while they are still small. This guide is that list.

Reports Only Help If You Read Them

The monthly routine in The HVAC Month-End Billing Review: A One-Hour Checklist leans on reports. This guide covers which ones, and which are worth a quick look every week as well.

The point of a report is a decision. If you look at a number and nothing changes, either the number is fine or you are looking at the wrong one. Keep the list short enough that you actually look at it.

HVACBossPro includes reports alongside the client records, jobs and invoices. Because the reports come from the same records the techs and office already use, nobody has to compile anything first.

Every Week: Open Invoices

The weekly must-read is the list of open invoices. Look at it with three questions:

• What is new? Invoices from this week that did not get paid at completion. Mostly customers without a card on file, or declined cards.
• What is getting old? Invoices past the point where automated reminders should have worked.
• Who is it? A homeowner who forgot, or a property manager whose statement is late?

Start with the oldest invoices. They need the most attention, and they are also the ones most likely to have a story behind them, such as a dispute nobody closed or a landlord who never got the statement.

Ten minutes on Monday morning with this list prevents most invoices from going seriously late. Declined cards found this way should get a text the same day, pointing the customer to the customer app.

Every Week: Completed Jobs

The second weekly look is at completed jobs. Confirm each one has an invoice and that the invoice has lines. Look for skipped jobs that never got rescheduled. If one tech's jobs keep showing up without notes or photos, it is easier to fix after a week than after a month.

Every Month: Billed Versus Collected

Once a month, look at what was billed and what was collected. The gap between them is your exposure. If billed keeps rising and collected does not, invoices are piling up somewhere. Comparing months is more useful than any single number:

• Is collected keeping pace with billed?
• Are open invoices growing or shrinking?
• Does the slow season show up where you expect it?

That last question ties into HVAC Cash Flow in the Slow Months: Billing Habits for Spring and Fall. Seeing last year's slow months on a report is the best warning for this year's.

Every Month: Customers by Tag

Tags such as Maintenance Plan, Commercial and VIP make reports more useful. Once a month, look at:

• Maintenance Plan customers. How many are there? Are tune-ups getting done when they come due, or sitting overdue on the Waiting List?
• Commercial and Monthly accounts. Did every account get a statement? Who is behind?
• Customers without a card on file. Good candidates for a friendly text about adding one in the customer app.

Custom fields can track anything else your business cares about, and those fields can help you sort reports the same way.

Every Month: What You Sold

Because every invoice is built from the service list, you can see which items you are billing. That answers practical questions:

• How many diagnostics turned into repairs?
• How many tune-ups did you do this month?
• Which repairs are most common this season?
• How many callbacks were billed at no charge?

Those answers feed pricing decisions, training and stocking the vans. If the same item keeps being written by hand instead of picked from the list, add it.

Who Should See Which Reports

HVACBossPro has office user roles, so not everyone needs to see everything. Many owners keep billed-versus-collected for themselves and give the office person the open invoice list and the monthly statement checks. More on dividing billing work is in Who Handles Billing: Office Roles in a Small HVAC Company.

A Short List, Read Regularly

Two weekly looks and three monthly ones cover what most HVAC owners need from billing reports: open invoices and completed jobs every week; billed versus collected, customers by tag and what you sold every month. For more on billing, visit the HVACBossPro HVAC invoicing software page.