Trades: measurements, hours and invoices without the detour via paper
The value is created on site, the invoice is created in the office. In between sit job sheets in the van, timesheets in a jacket pocket and details that get typed twice: once into the costing, once into accounting. We follow that route step by step and shorten it wherever it pays off for your business — capture on site, capture once, file it so it holds up as evidence.
Germany counts around one million trades businesses (ZDH) — and almost every one of them runs the same double bookkeeping of paper and programme. The job comes in by phone, is noted on a pad, transferred into the weekly plan, printed as a measurement sheet, annotated by hand on site, left in the van, handed in at the office on Friday, typed into the costing, carried over into payroll and finally written into the invoice. Nine stations at which the same detail is created, six of them by hand. That is where we start: not with a new programme, but with a clean review of that route.
The route of the job sheet — before and after
Which workflows really cost time in a trades business
Trades businesses rarely lose time on the actual work. They lose it on the organisation around it: on appointments moved three times, on materials that turn out to be missing at short notice, on hours that can no longer be allocated, and on invoices that go out weeks after handover. The following nine workflows appear in nearly every review, whatever the trade — electrical, plumbing, heating and ventilation just as much as roofing, joinery, metalwork, painting or landscaping.
Taking the job
Enquiries arrive by phone, mailbox, web form and a shout across the yard. Whoever takes them writes them down with varying completeness. If the floor number, the meter reference or the customer's availability is missing, it costs a return visit later — the most expensive form of rework in the trades.
Scheduling and dispatch
The weekly plan hangs on the wall or sits in a file that only one person maintains. If an engineer is off sick or an emergency call gets slotted in, the plan changes — but the crew in the van only finds out by phone. Who was where and when can only be reconstructed afterwards with effort.
Materials
Materials are collected from the wholesaler, taken from the store or delivered straight to site. Whether an issue was allocated to the job is decided by a slip of paper in the store. Anything that does not make it there never shows up in the post-costing and quietly disappears from the margin.
On-site measurement
Measurements are taken on paper, in a notebook or as a photo on a works phone. For billing they have to be transferred into the schedule of rates — by someone who was not there. Queries back to the engineer are the rule rather than the exception.
Job sheets and daywork records
Daywork depends on the customer's signature on the record. If it is missing or the sheet is illegible, the item usually does not get billed. Variations that nobody documented are the most common silent loss on daywork jobs.
Time recording
Hours are noted on a sheet, transferred into a list in the evening and entered again for payroll at the end of the month. The same detail passes through three pairs of hands. Every transfer costs time and creates discrepancies that have to be reconciled later.
Invoicing
Interim and final invoices are built from measurements, hours and materials — three sources that all run late. By the time everything is together, weeks have passed. Every week later means payment a week later, and open variations quietly get forgotten.
Maintenance contracts
Scheduled inspections, repeat tests and service intervals live in a list that gets reviewed once a year. Whoever keeps it knows the deadlines; whoever does not loses predictable revenue, because appointments simply slip through.
Warranty documentation
Handover records, test certificates, instruction confirmations and site photos sit in the site folder, in a mailbox and on private devices. If a defect is claimed years later, the search begins — and the state of the evidence decides what the case costs.
The route of the job sheet: from the van to the office
When we review a trades business, we first follow a single sheet of paper. Not the job, not the system — the sheet. It is the most honest witness to the workflow, because it physically passes through every station and creates work at each one. In a business without mobile capture, a typical job sheet travels like this:
- Printed in the office in the morning or taken from the folder and handed to the engineer
- Annotated by hand on site: working hours, materials fitted, anything unusual
- Signed by the customer, provided someone with authority is present
- Left in the van, often until the end of the week, occasionally until month end
- Handed in at the office, sorted and checked for legibility
- Typed into job processing, with queries back to the engineer about unclear entries
- Hours carried separately into payroll, materials allocated separately to post-costing
- Filed as a document so it can be found again in the event of a claim or an audit
The most expensive point is not on site
What can be captured on a device — and what stays with people
A realistic division of labour in a trades business
We automate the recurring part and leave the decisions where experience is needed.
What technology carries reliably in the trades
- Included: Capture hours, materials and activity on site instead of transferring them in the evening
- Included: Enter measurements once and reuse them in the quote, the job and the invoice
- Included: Take the customer's signature on the device and tie it firmly to the job
- Included: Attach site photos to the right job automatically instead of collecting them in a gallery
- Included: Propose maintenance and inspection dates from the contract in good time
- Included: File documents so they cannot be altered unnoticed and can be found without searching
- Included: Show the job status to the office and the customer without anyone phoning
What stays with your people
- Not included: Judging whether the work can technically be carried out as planned
- Not included: Dealing with an annoyed customer when an appointment falls through
- Not included: Deciding whether an extra piece of work is goodwill or a chargeable variation
- Not included: Weighing up which site takes priority when someone is off sick
- Not included: Rare special cases that occur once a year and look different every time
- Not included: Reviewing measurements professionally when the billing is disputed
- Not included: Dealing with authorities, expert witnesses and insurers after damage occurs
We draw that line deliberately early. A special case that occurs twice a year is no candidate for automation — the effort of covering every exception clearly outweighs the benefit. The sensible route is the opposite one: the normal case runs through automatically, the exception is cleanly flagged as an exception and lands with a person who can decide it. A system that tries to force every exception into a form will be bypassed on site — and then you are worse off than you were with paper.
Acceptance on site decides everything else
The best mobile capture is worthless if it cannot be operated with cold fingers on a roof, in a boiler room without signal or with gloves on in winter. That is why we test every solution against the conditions in which it is actually used, not at a desk. Anything that costs more than a minute per visit will not be adopted; anything that creates more typing than the paper sheet will be bypassed. So we prefer few mandatory fields, large buttons, selection instead of free text, and capture that also works without a mobile signal and syncs later.
How a project runs in a trades business
Initial call
In about 30 minutes (project experience) we clarify which trade you work in, how many engineers are out every day, which programmes run in the office and where you see the biggest friction. That call often already shows whether the bottleneck sits in scheduling, in capture or in invoicing.
Review in the office and on site
The process analysis takes place where the work happens: half a day in the office with scheduling, job processing and invoicing, half a day on a live site. We look at how measurements are taken, how hours are noted and what happens to the sheet afterwards. Exceptions and workarounds are of particular interest to us.
Recording the system landscape
We record which programmes are in use: trade software, inventory management, accounting, payroll, spreadsheets. That includes the question of where which data is held and which interfaces it already flows through — or does not. Export options often exist and were simply never set up.
Report with measures and estimated prices
You receive a written report: a view of the workflow, named findings with an estimated annual effort and a list of measures in the recommended order. Every measure gets an estimated price so you can decide what comes first. The report belongs to you and commits you to nothing.
Implementation, usually in two steps
We normally start with capture at the point of origin and then connect the systems. That is either process automation for the recurring manual work or an interface between trade software and accounting. The fixed price is set before we start, because scope and system landscape are known after the analysis.
Rollout with the crew, then operation
Rollout happens with the people who use it: a short set of instructions, one round together on a live site, then a week with feedback. After that, ongoing operations and maintenance can monitor the transfers on request, so a silent failure is not first noticed in accounting. Support during rollout is described under training and rollout.
In about 30 minutes (project experience) we clarify which trade you work in, how many engineers are out every day, which programmes run in the office and where you see the biggest friction. That call often already shows whether the bottleneck sits in scheduling, in capture or in invoicing.
The process analysis takes place where the work happens: half a day in the office with scheduling, job processing and invoicing, half a day on a live site. We look at how measurements are taken, how hours are noted and what happens to the sheet afterwards. Exceptions and workarounds are of particular interest to us.
We record which programmes are in use: trade software, inventory management, accounting, payroll, spreadsheets. That includes the question of where which data is held and which interfaces it already flows through — or does not. Export options often exist and were simply never set up.
You receive a written report: a view of the workflow, named findings with an estimated annual effort and a list of measures in the recommended order. Every measure gets an estimated price so you can decide what comes first. The report belongs to you and commits you to nothing.
We normally start with capture at the point of origin and then connect the systems. That is either process automation for the recurring manual work or an interface between trade software and accounting. The fixed price is set before we start, because scope and system landscape are known after the analysis.
Rollout happens with the people who use it: a short set of instructions, one round together on a live site, then a week with feedback. After that, ongoing operations and maintenance can monitor the transfers on request, so a silent failure is not first noticed in accounting. Support during rollout is described under training and rollout.
Entry point for trades businesses · net plus VAT
- Review in the office and on a live site
- The route of the job sheet and timesheet mapped in full
- Duplicate entry between costing, payroll and accounting named
- Written report with measures and an estimated price per measure
For one clearly defined workflow at a single site — for example the route from the job through measurement and hours to the invoice — the process analysis is 1,900 € net. Implementation afterwards begins at 4,900 € net per automation or interface as a fixed price after the analysis, ongoing support at 190 € net per month. All prices net plus VAT; details on the pricing overview.
Prices as of September 2026. Ongoing services are booked individually and can be cancelled monthly; there is no minimum term.
Evidence, retention and data protection on site
In the trades, documentation is not an end in itself. In a dispute it decides whether work can be billed at all and whether a defect claim falls on the business. Anyone digitising documents therefore has to solve two things at once: the document has to be available faster than before, and it has to meet the requirements placed on proper record keeping. We build the filing so that both fit together.
Filing that meets GoBD rules
Invoices, delivery notes and job records captured digitally have to be filed so that they are unalterable, complete and traceable. That calls for an ordered filing structure, a traceable change history and a procedural documentation describing how a document enters the system. We set the filing up to meet those requirements and document the route in writing.
Recording working time
In the sectors listed in section 2a of the German act against undeclared work — which includes construction — specific duties apply to recording working time. Capture that cleanly holds start, end and duration and cannot be altered unnoticed afterwards serves that purpose as a by-product and removes the separate paper trail for payroll and post-costing.
Warranty documentation
Handover record, test certificate, instruction confirmation and site photos are, years later, the only evidence of what was actually carried out and handed over. The applicable periods depend on the contract basis and the trade. What matters is that the documents are tied to the job and remain findable within minutes, even once the site manager of the day has long left the business.
Data protection in customer premises
On sites and in private homes, personal data is created: names, addresses, photographs and occasionally images of third parties' rooms. We clarify which images are genuinely needed, who may see them and how long they are kept. Private devices used as storage are the most common weak point here — and the easiest one to remove.
We are engineers, not legal advisers
Where the time sits today
| Workflow | Commonly found | After the change | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time recording | Paper sheet, list in the evening, payroll at month end | Captured once on site; payroll and post-costing draw on the same record | Capture has to be faster than paper, otherwise it gets bypassed |
| On-site measurement | Handwritten, transferred into the schedule of rates in the office | Captured at the property and reused in the quote and the invoice | Items from your real service catalogue instead of free text entry |
| Daywork record | Triplicate form, signature on paper | Record signed on the device and tied to the job immediately | Evidential value of the signature and unalterable filing |
| Materials issue | Slip of paper in the store, occasional allocation to a job | Issue captured as the item leaves the shelf, job is a mandatory field | Capture must not slow down the flow of work in the store |
| Invoicing | Collect, check, type; invoice weeks after handover | A draft invoice is built from existing data; the office checks and releases it | Release stays with people, the assembly does not |
| Maintenance contracts | A list reviewed once a year | Due appointments are proposed in good time and scheduled | Deadlines and intervals must be maintained cleanly from the contract |
Typical sequences from trades projects
Illustrative scenarios from typical project sequences (project experience), anonymised and without customer details. No outcomes are promised.
No engineer wants paperwork. But every one of them wants to finish on time — and that, exactly, is what decides whether mobile capture is adopted or rejected.
Where trades businesses usually start with us
The first step is almost always the process analysis, because without a proper review there is no serious way of saying whether the bottleneck sits in scheduling or in invoicing. Depending on the findings, process automation for recurring manual work follows, or an interface between trade software, inventory management and accounting, or data integration where customer and property data is maintained in several places. If paper is in the way, the topic is document digitisation including procedural documentation; if the overview of workload and post-costing is missing, it is metrics and reporting. If a piece of trade software runs in the background that nobody supports any more, legacy replacement is the subject, and if you want the established workflow written down, that is process documentation. Other sectors with similar questions are listed in the industries overview, and our service area in the regions overview.
Not sure where the bottleneck sits in your business?
Describe in a few sentences which trade you work in, how many engineers are out every day and where things get stuck. We will tell you frankly whether an analysis is worth it or whether a smaller step will do.