#The Invisible Job in Every Trade Business

Ask most people what it takes to run a plumbing business and they'll describe a van, a set of tools and someone who knows what they're doing. That's about half of it.

The other half is a job that has no title, doesn't appear on the website, isn't on the van, and in a great many cases isn't on the payroll either. Someone answers the phone while he's under a floor. Someone turns a photo of a scribbled measurement into a quote that looks professional. Someone notices that the Hendersons still haven't paid for the bathroom in April. Someone finds out, at nine o'clock on a Sunday night, that there's a VAT return due on Friday.

In a lot of UK trade businesses, that someone is his partner. And the job she's doing is not "helping out with the paperwork". It's finance, operations and customer service, run in the margins of an evening.

This piece is about naming that job properly — because businesses tend to fix the problems they can see, and this one has been invisible for a long time.

#A Tuesday

Not a dramatic day. An ordinary one.

7.40am — He's gone. On the way out he mentions the Parkers want the extra socket doing while he's there, and can you ring the merchant about the delivery.

8.15am — Two missed calls from the same number. One's a new enquiry, one's a customer asking what time he's coming. You don't actually know what time he's coming, because the diary is in his head and on his phone. You give her a window and hope.

9.30am — School run done. You ring the merchant. The delivery's Thursday, not Wednesday, which means Thursday's job now can't happen on Thursday. You'll need to move it. You can't move it until you've spoken to him, and he's in a loft.

11.00am — You write the quote for the job he looked at on Friday. You have: a photo of a wall, three measurements on the back of an envelope, and "about eight hundred quid I said". You build it out properly, price the materials, add the VAT, make it look like it came from a real company. Twenty-five minutes.

1.20pm — A customer emails to ask whether the invoice from last month included the extra day. You don't know. You go and look. It didn't. That's £280 nobody has ever mentioned again, and now you have the awkward job of deciding whether to raise it.

3.00pm — Second reminder to the Hendersons. You rewrite it four times so it doesn't sound rude. It's the third time you've asked to be paid for work that was finished in April.

5.30pm — He's back. You ask what he actually did today, because you can't invoice a job you can't see. He's tired and it comes out in bullet points. You write it down. He says he'll send you the photos and he won't, not tonight.

9.10pm — Kids down. Laptop open at the kitchen table. Six invoices, the VAT spreadsheet, and a carrier bag of receipts from the van that have been through a wash cycle of diesel and dust. You do the invoices. You leave the receipts.

That's not a bad day. Nothing went wrong on that day.

#What the job actually is

Written out, the list is longer than most people expect:

• Answering the phone and qualifying enquiries
• Booking work and rescheduling it when materials slip
• Writing and sending quotes
• Following up quotes that haven't been answered
• Raising invoices
• Chasing late payment
• Recording and categorising expenses
• Reconciling the bank
• VAT returns and Self Assessment paperwork
• Keeping certificates, sign-offs and job records findable
• Handling complaints and warranty callbacks
• Ordering materials and dealing with merchants
• Insurance, memberships and renewals
• Anything to do with the website, reviews or Facebook page

In a business large enough to have an office, that's a credit controller, a bookkeeper, a scheduler and a receptionist. In a two-person trade business it's one person, usually after tea.

#What it would cost to buy in

You can do this sum with your own numbers, and it's worth doing once — not because you're going to outsource all of it, but because seeing a figure changes how the job gets treated.

Take the hours honestly. Most people running the office of a one- or two-van business land somewhere between ten and twenty hours a week once you count the phone calls. Then price the pieces at whatever your local going rate is: a bookkeeper for the books, a call-answering service for the phone, and your own hourly value for the rest.

Whatever number you get, notice two things about it. First, it's a real cost the business is currently paying in someone's evenings rather than in money. Second, it's almost certainly more than the business thinks it's getting for free.

We're not going to give you a national average here, because there isn't a reliable one and inventing one wouldn't help you. Use your own hours and your own local rates. The figure that matters is yours.

#Why it stays invisible

A few reasons, and none of them are anybody being unreasonable.

It doesn't look like work from the outside. The tools are visible. The van is visible. A laptop on a kitchen table at nine at night looks like someone on a laptop.

It has no boundaries. Nobody clocks in to it, so nobody clocks out of it either. It leaks into evenings, weekends and holidays, and because it leaks it never gets measured.

It's often unpaid or paid as an afterthought. Which makes it hard to talk about as a job, because the business isn't treating it as one.

It only gets noticed when it fails. Nobody remarks on the invoice that went out on time. Everybody notices the one that didn't go out at all.

#What it costs the business when it's squeezed

This is the part worth taking to whoever holds the chequebook, because it isn't a fairness argument, it's a money argument.

Quotes that go out late lose work. A quote sent four days after the visit competes with two that were sent the same day. The job doesn't get lost on price; it gets lost on the fact that someone else answered first.

Invoices that go out late get paid late. Every day between finishing a job and sending the invoice is a day added to the front of however long the customer takes. Invoice a fortnight after completion on 30-day terms and you've quietly turned it into six weeks.

Extras that don't get written down don't get billed. The socket while he's there, the extra half day, the bit of making good. Each one is small. Together they're the difference between a decent year and an average one.

Expenses that never get recorded are tax you didn't need to pay. A receipt that went through the wash is money the business has spent and can't prove it spent.

And there's a bus-factor problem. If everything about who owes what and what was promised to whom lives in one person's head, the business stops the week they're ill.

None of those are admin failures. They're revenue.

#Three things that actually change it

1. Name it. It's a job. Give it a name — office manager, operations, whatever fits — and say out loud what's included in it and what isn't. A job with edges can be improved. An amorphous pile of "the paperwork" can't.

2. Resource it. If someone is doing ten to twenty hours a week for the business, the business can pay them for it. There are sensible, legitimate ways to do that depending on whether you're a sole trader, a partnership or a limited company — and there can be genuine tax advantages to getting it right rather than leaving it informal. That's a conversation for your accountant, and it's worth having.

3. Stop the information going through a person. This is the big one, and it's the one software actually helps with.

Look back at that Tuesday. The single biggest time sink wasn't the invoicing — it was the relay. Job details going from a customer, to him, into his head, out loud over tea, onto a bit of paper, into a spreadsheet, into an invoice. Six handoffs, each one a chance for a number to go missing.

Take the relay out and most of the day gets shorter. If the job is recorded once, on site, at the moment it happens — what was done, what went in, a photograph of the receipt — then the person doing the office doesn't have to extract it from anybody. They open the job and it's there.

#What good looks like

A Monday morning where you can see the week without asking anyone.

Quotes going out the same day as the visit, because the details didn't have to be chased first. Invoices going out the day the job's finished, because the invoice is built from the job rather than re-typed from scratch. Receipts photographed at the counter instead of being excavated from the van in January. One place where "who still owes us money" is a screen rather than a memory.

And an evening that ends when the day ends.

#Where to start

Pick the relay. Not the invoicing, not the filing — the relay. For one week, get every job recorded on site by the person who did it, with a photo, at the time. Nothing else has to change yet.

Most people find that fixing that one thing takes more off the evening than any amount of getting faster at the paperwork ever did.

TradePlanr is job management software for UK trades — quotes, invoices, expenses, card payments and certificates in one place, on the phone on site and in a browser at the kitchen table. There's a version of our site written for the partner who runs the office, and if you're the one doing the books, this guide is for you. Free to start, no card needed.