Playbook, electrical contractor
Who the invoice goes to is rarely who opened the door
An electrician's invoice is unusual twice over. There is nearly always a document attached to it that matters more than it does, and the person who watched the work happen is frequently not the person paying for it. Rented property produces both at once: an agent instructed, a landlord pays, a tenant let you in and is entitled to a copy of the report, and two years later a solicitor is trying to match a payment to a certificate.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for billing and invoices holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Rented work has three parties wanting three different things: the agent wants an invoice carrying their own reference, the landlord wants the periodic report for the letting file, and the tenant is entitled to a copy of the report while having nothing to do with the money.
- The certificate or report carries a reference and a date that somebody will match against an invoice years afterwards, so an invoice that does not name the address and the document it relates to is the one that comes back for reissue.
- Commercial work runs on a purchase order number that has to be on the invoice before anybody in accounts will look at it, and a fire alarm or emergency lighting service invoice is often checked against the visit recorded in the building's log book.
- Retention and staged payment appear on larger contracts and on essentially nothing domestic, so a firm doing both is running two payment stories at once and the material has to keep them apart or answer both wrongly.
How it arrives
- can you send the invoice to the letting agent
- i need a copy of the invoice for my accountant
- can you put our purchase order number on it
- who pays for the landlord report me or the tenant
- can the invoice be in the company name
- when is payment due after the job
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Who you invoice on rented work, written as a standing rule | Not as a case by case decision. Agents check this before they put a firm on a list, and one clear line answering it does more for that relationship than anything else on the site. |
|---|---|
| What appears on every invoice as standard | The address, the date attended, the reference of any certificate issued, and the payment terms. A landlord building a letting file needs the address and the reference on it, and will ask you to reissue when they are missing. |
| Your commercial invoicing requirements | Whether a purchase order is needed before work starts, where a site or job reference goes, and what happens when the invoice arrives without one. Say what happens without it, because that is the conversation your office keeps having. |
| Payment terms, methods and lateness | The number of days, what you accept, whether card payment on the day is possible, and your position when it goes past. Published, rather than read for the first time at the bottom of an invoice. |
The reply
We can invoice the letting agent directly and that is the usual arrangement, though the instruction has to come from them rather than from the tenant [1]. The report itself is a separate matter from where the invoice lands: it goes to whoever holds the property, and a copy goes to the tenant [2]. Every invoice carries the address, the date we attended and the reference of any certificate issued, because that is what the file needs later. I have no view of your account and cannot see, send or reissue an invoice, so if this is about a job already done, leave me the address and a name and the office will pick it up.
It separates the money from the document in the second sentence, because conflating those two is what produces the follow up call. The line about what every invoice carries is there to pre-empt the reissue request rather than to sound thorough. The limitation is stated as a fact about what the assistant can see, not as a policy.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any question about a specific invoice, a balance, a reissue, a purchase order added after the event, or when a payment will be taken.
I have no view of your account or of any invoice, so I cannot check what was raised or change it. Leave me your name, an email and the address the work was at, and the office will send it over or reissue it as you need.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never confirm that an invoice has been sent, paid or received, since nothing here can see an account and a confident wrong answer about money costs more than silence.
- Never tell a tenant what a landlord was charged, because the tenant is not the paying party and the figure is not theirs to be handed.
- Never agree to add a purchase order number, split a bill or change the billing name, as each has a real cost behind it and belongs to whoever raises the invoice.
- Never state a payment term or a late charge that is not in the published terms, because the invented version becomes the one being argued over.
Questions
- Can it send somebody a copy of an invoice?
- No. It has no view of your accounts and nothing it can generate. What it can do is explain who you invoice on rented work, say what appears on an invoice as standard, and collect the address, so the office finds the right file first time instead of asking three questions to get there.
- Is the agent question worth answering on the site?
- It is one of the first things a letting agent checks before adding a firm to a list, alongside the scheme registration. Answering it in a line, in their vocabulary, is cheap and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets a firm added rather than left on a shortlist.
- Does the certificate reference really need to be on the invoice?
- It saves the reissue. A landlord filing for an inspection, or a seller's solicitor years later, is matching a document to a payment. An invoice that names neither the address nor the report is the one that arrives back in your inbox with a polite question attached.
Keep reading
- Everything for a electrical contractorCall out charges, EV charger enquiries and landlord certificates are answerable. A described electrical fault is an escalation, not a question.
- Handling billing and invoices in generalInvoice copies, tax numbers, purchase order references. Nearly all of it is account specific, so the honest handling is process plus a clean handover.
- The complaint that arrives the day after the report doesA coded observation on an inspection reads to some customers as an upsell. That complaint is about trust, not about wiring.
- Answering hours, working hours and the hours the power can be offThe phone is answered until five. A job that turns the supply off cannot start at three, and a test may only run when a building is empty.
- One date, and several diaries that are not the electrician'sScaffolding, a suspended bay, a second electrician and a supply appointment can all hang off one day, and moving it moves none of them.
Try it on your own material
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