A shoebox of worksheets at the end of the month
At the end of the month, the worksheets come in. Each operator has filled in a sheet or a notebook for each day: customer, fields, operation, acres or hours, sometimes loads, sometimes nothing but a farm name. Some came in weekly, some are still in cabs. The office, which may be your partner at the kitchen table, sorts them by customer and starts working out invoices.
Drilling is charged per acre, but that farm is in hectares. Hedge cutting is by the hour, but the operator wrote 'all day'. Silage was charged per acre for mowing, per hour for the forage harvester and per load for carting. One customer gets a discount. Another pays for road time. And the acres on the worksheet do not match the customer's field list.
Why contracting invoices take so long
The pricing is complex, and the information needed for it is split between the operator's worksheet, the rate list and your head.
- Each operation has its own unit: acres or hectares, hours, loads, bales, metres of hedge.
- Rates vary by customer, by distance, by volume of work and sometimes by conditions.
- Operators record what they know, which is not always the unit you charge in.
- Field areas on worksheets are estimates; customers' own records may differ.
- Extras such as road time, materials, seed, wrap or fuel surcharges are easy to miss.
So each invoice is a small piece of detective work, and the office has a pile of them to do in the busiest months of the year.
The cost of slow or inaccurate invoicing
Invoices that go out late get paid late, and a contracting business carries a lot of costs, from fuel to wages to machinery finance, before the money comes in. Invoices that go out wrong cause disputes, and a customer querying acres is a customer paying later still.
Work that never gets invoiced is the most painful cost, and it happens most often with small jobs and extras. A few hours of loader work, road time on a long move, a small extra field done while the drill was on the farm. Each is a small amount. Across a season, it adds up.
Job records that price themselves
What we build is a job record for each piece of work that carries everything needed to price it, and invoices built from those records.
- Operators record each job on a phone at the end of it: customer and fields from a list, operation, and the measure for that operation. Hours come from a start and stop. Acres come from the customer's field list, or from the operator's terminal if it exports worked area.
- Your rate list sits in the system: each operation, its unit and standard rate, and any customer-specific rates or discounts.
- Extras such as road time, materials and surcharges are added by rule, for example road time over a distance you set, or by the operator ticking a box.
- Each job is priced automatically. Jobs where the measure is missing, or where the worked area differs from the customer's field area by more than you allow, go into a check list.
- At the invoicing date you choose, each customer's priced jobs become a draft invoice in Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, with a line per field and operation.
- You review and send. Unpaid invoices can be chased from the same place.
| Operation | Measure recorded | Priced by |
|---|---|---|
| Drilling | Area from field list or terminal | Rate per acre or hectare, per customer |
| Hedge cutting | Hours from start and stop | Rate per hour |
| Silage carting | Loads | Rate per load |
| Baling | Bale count | Rate per bale, plus wrap or net |
| Road time | Distance or time between farms | Rule you set |
Month end without the shoebox
During the month, operators record each job on their phones. By the end of the month, most jobs are already priced. The office opens the check list and sees three: a drilling job where the terminal area was well under the field area, which turns out to be a part field; a hedging job with no finish time; and a customer whose discount needs confirming. Twenty minutes later, the draft invoices are ready in Xero.
When a customer queries acres, the job record shows the field, the area source and the operator's note.
Are your invoices built from worksheets?
- Month-end invoicing takes days of sorting worksheets.
- Operators' records do not always match the unit you charge in.
- Customer-specific rates and discounts live in your head.
- Extras like road time and materials are sometimes missed.
- Customers query acres and you struggle to show where the figure came from.