Have you ever been on your trade clients website and been amazed by their advertised work, but then been into their Accounting Software and thought, “what the...?”

9/10 times, they have called on the help of their partner, mother or sister’s best friend’s cousin who used MYOB once 20 years ago to get set-up. You have to start somewhere, but I am sure every bookkeeper has experienced the long-term frustration from sub-par setup. Chart of Accounts are incomplete, 1000+ unreconciled items, business accounts used for personal expenses and the only receipt you can find is for a chocolate milk and meat pie from the servo.

Tradies are out fixing everyone else problems, but who is fixing theirs?

50% of their work is on the tools and the other 50% is from their mobile phones, so to achieve the best results, your process needs to fit this mould.

NextMinute works on both IOS and Android devices, allowing access to the job information needed from anywhere, with any device.

Once onsite, the team can open a job or task and start a timer, recording timesheets into NextMinute directly from the mobile app. A GPS pin will drop when the timer starts, so the boss has peace of mind even when they’re not on site. The NextMinute timesheets can then sync straight into Xero for payroll.

Most tradies glove boxes are full of receipts, so by suggesting ReceiptBank or Hubdoc, they can use their mobiles to get the data entry sorted. Once the receipts are in Xero they can be imported to NextMinute so they can be on-charged to the associated jobs.

Labour rates and other job related expenses can be automatically marked-up, allowing for accurate costs to be captured on the client invoices. Invoices can then be sent directly to the customer via NextMinute and will again sync back into Xero. 

All of this is wrapped up into a neat financial report showing the job costing and expected revenue. Tradies tend to not worry about costs, but if you can show your clients the monetary benefits from having good processes, it will also help when it comes to plugging any revenue leakage - allowing them to continue spending on the important stuff, like Friday beers and pizza for the team.

Your clients wouldn’t put a roof up with no walls, just like you wouldn’t prepare BAS without finalising the bank reconciliations. These guys didn’t become builders to sit behind a computer, we want to improve the collaboration between you and your clients, so that you can focus on helping them fix their businesses.

You are in a prime position to help tradies run their business just as well as they can build.