HVACBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Who Handles Billing: Office Roles in a Small HVAC Company

In a two-van HVAC company, billing usually belongs to whoever has time, which means nobody owns it. The owner does some at night. The office person does some between phone calls. The techs do some on clipboards. Nothing falls through on purpose, but things fall through. Giving each person a clear part of billing fixes most of that.

Billing Has Three Jobs

Deciding who reads which numbers, discussed in HVAC Billing Reports: What to Look at Each Week and Each Month, is part of a bigger question: who does what in billing?

It helps to split billing into three jobs:

• Capturing the work. What was done, with what parts, at which address.
• Collecting the money. Charging cards, sending statements, following up.
• Setting the rules. Prices, policies, terms and exceptions.

In most small HVAC companies, those map neatly onto the techs, the office and the owner.

The Techs: Capture the Work

Techs log in to the HVACBossPro tech app with the company login and their own PIN. Their billing job is narrow but important:

• Add every part, labor line and pound of refrigerant to the job from the service list.
• Take before-and-after photos and write a short note.
• Explain the charges to the customer before tapping Complete.
• Tap Complete, which creates the invoice and can charge the card on file.

Techs should not be setting prices or deciding policy on site. If something does not fit the service list, they note it and the office handles it. Because each tech has a personal PIN, every job, photo and note is tied to the person who did it.

The Office: Collect the Money

The office person owns everything between Complete and paid:

• Daily: check that completed jobs have invoices, and fix anything that looks wrong.
• Same day: text customers whose cards declined and point them to the customer app.
• Weekly: work the open invoice list. Personal texts and calls for invoices automated reminders did not clear.
• Monthly: make sure every Monthly account gets its statement, with every address on it.
• Always: answer billing questions through two-way texting with the job record open.

The office also keeps client records clean: addresses, equipment, card-on-file status, tags such as Maintenance Plan and Commercial, and approval rules for landlords and commercial accounts.

The Owner: Set the Rules

The owner's billing job is mostly upstream:

• The service list. Names and prices for everything the company sells.
• Policies. Diagnostic credits, deposits, callbacks, past-due steps and when to hold service.
• Terms. What monthly accounts get, and when payment is due.
• Exceptions. Goodwill credits and disputes the office cannot settle by policy.
• Review. The month-end review and the billed-versus-collected numbers.

Write these rules down in one short document and give a copy to the office. When the office person can point to a written rule, such as “we hold the next tune-up until the last invoice is paid,” the conversation with the customer is about the policy, not about the person enforcing it. That protects the office person as much as it protects the company.

When the owner sets clear rules, the office can handle almost every billing conversation without interrupting the owner on a job site.

Office User Roles

HVACBossPro has office user roles, so each person in the office sees what they need. A dispatcher who schedules jobs does not need the same access as the person handling billing, and the owner may want certain reports and settings for themselves. Set roles to match the jobs above.

Roles also matter when someone leaves. Turning off a tech's PIN or an office user's login ends their access, without changing passwords for everyone else.

When One Person Does It All

Plenty of HVAC companies are an owner and one or two techs, with the owner's spouse or the owner alone doing the office work. The three jobs still exist; they just share a person. A schedule helps:

• Ten minutes each evening to check completed jobs and declines.
• Half an hour on Monday for open invoices.
• One hour at month end for the review in The HVAC Month-End Billing Review: A One-Hour Checklist.

Because the tech app creates invoices and charges cards at completion, the evening work stays short.

Clear Jobs, Fewer Gaps

Billing goes wrong in the gaps between people. Techs capture the work, the office collects the money, the owner sets the rules, and roles in the software match those jobs. For all billing features and guides, see the HVACBossPro HVAC invoicing software page.