A phone call to a friendly contractor at peak
Harvest is on and you are behind. A customer's wheat is ready and your combine is three days away. You ring a friendly contractor in the next valley, who has a combine free tomorrow. Terms are agreed on the phone: his rate per acre, he will send you the invoice, you will bill the customer. He combines the fields, and moves on.
Weeks later his invoice arrives. It says 'combining for you, 85 acres'. Your customer's fields add up to a different figure. Your own invoice to the customer has not gone out, because nobody wrote the job down in your system. And you cannot remember whether you agreed that he would charge for carting too.
Why handed-on work slips through
Hiring in is a favour between businesses, usually agreed quickly and informally, at the busiest time of year.
- Terms are agreed on the phone and not written down.
- The other contractor's operators are not in your system, so the job is not recorded.
- Their invoice arrives weeks later, in their format, with their measurements.
- Your customer is billed from your records, which are missing the job.
- Work may go the other way too, when you do jobs for other contractors.
If you hand on work regularly, the amounts are significant, both in cost and in income you should be recharging.
Measurement adds another layer. The other contractor measures in his own way: from his terminal, from his customer list, or from a guess at the headland. Your customer measures from their field records. Without a single reference for the fields, three different figures for the same job are normal, and the one on the invoice depends on who sends theirs first.
What informal hiring in costs
The most direct cost is work done for your customer that never gets billed. The other contractor's invoice gets paid, and the recharge to your customer is forgotten. The second is paying for more than was done, because the other contractor's acres were never checked against the customer's fields.
There are relationship costs too. Customers want to know who worked on their land and when. A customer who later finds out another contractor did their fields, without being told, may be unhappy, especially if something went wrong.
Recording handed-on work like your own
What we build is a way to record jobs done by other contractors on your behalf, in the same system as your own work.
- The job is on your booking board already. When you hand it on, you mark it as done by another contractor, pick them from a list, and record the terms you agreed: rate, unit, and what is included.
- The other contractor can be sent a link to record fields done, dates and measures on their phone, or you enter them from what they tell you.
- Fields and areas are checked against your customer's field map, and differences are flagged.
- The job is priced to your customer at your rate card, with any markup or pass-through you decide, and goes on their invoice.
- When the other contractor's invoice arrives, it is read and matched to the job, and differences in measure or rate are flagged before you pay it.
- Work you do for other contractors can be recorded the same way, as a customer with its own terms.
| Step | Before | With the handed-on job record |
|---|---|---|
| Terms agreed | Phone, not written | Recorded on the job |
| Work done | Their operator, no record in your system | Fields and measures recorded |
| Their invoice | Paid as received | Matched to the job, differences flagged |
| Your customer's invoice | Sometimes forgotten | Created from the job |
After harvest, with the handed-on jobs in view
At the end of harvest, the report shows four jobs passed to two other contractors. Three are recharged and paid. The fourth, eighty-five acres of combining, is matched against the customer's field map, which shows eighty acres; the other contractor's invoice is queried, and it turns out a headland was counted twice. Your customer is billed for the eighty acres at your rate.
The customer's work record shows who combined which field, on which date, so there are no surprises.
Do you hand on work informally?
- Other contractors are hired in by phone with terms not written down.
- Their invoices are paid without checking against the fields.
- Recharging your customer is sometimes forgotten.
- Customers are not always told who worked on their land.
- You do work for other contractors and track it loosely.