Why your quote and your invoice should be the same record

Ask a builder where their last payment argument started and it is rarely the work. It is a line on the invoice that was not on the quote, a variation that was agreed on site and written down nowhere, or a retention figure that came out of somebody's memory of a conversation in March.

The cause is that the quote and the invoice were two documents. One was typed in a quoting tool or a spreadsheet in the office; the other was typed weeks later, from the first one, from a diary, and from what the person remembered. Every gap between the two is a gap the client can stand in.

The quote is priced from your own price book. When it is accepted it becomes the job, with the same lines. Variations are raised against the job as they happen, from a phone on site, with a photo if it helps, and the client agrees them there. The invoice, or the payment application, is built from the job's lines and its agreed variations, so it can only ever say what the quote said plus what was agreed since.

• The client sees the same line names on the invoice as on the quote.
• A variation has a date, a photo and an agreement attached to it.
• Retention and the final account are worked from the same figures, not re-typed.

It does not make a client pay faster on its own; it removes the reason they gave for not paying. And it does not replace the conversation on site; it records it.

The best invoice is the one the client has already read, one line at a time, since the day they accepted the quote.

Questions

Do I have to change how I price?

No. Your price book stays your price book. The change is that the quote, the job and the invoice read from it once rather than being typed three times.

What about a variation the client agreed verbally?

Raise it on the job the same day, from the phone, and send it for agreement. A variation nobody wrote down is the one that becomes the argument.