When your team is primarily based onsite a lot of the working day, apps can be even more beneficial. For plumbers, having the right tools in your pocket can make any job a lot easier and more straightforward.
Best Plumber Apps to Run a Successful Business
Equip yourself with the best plumber’s tools to ensure you are prepared for every job that comes your way. There are so many apps out there to help you manage every aspect of your business. Let’s take a look at the different areas of the job and see how utilising apps can help streamline each one.
- For invoicing
- For certificates
- For job sheets
- For collaborating
- For communications
- For taking measurements
- For planning routes
- For calculating formulas
1. For invoicing
Invoicing is such an important part of the sales process. It’s crucial to get it done right and get it done quickly. This way, your customers get a professional service and you and your team get paid on time.
Not everyone has time to become accounting pros, so that’s why using invoicing apps for plumbers is vital to help your business. Apps like QuickBooks, Xero or Sage can be a great tool for plumbers to manage their finances and digitise their taxes, invoices, payroll and expenses.
Clik Service integrates with these third-party accounts packages to keep your records cohesive across all programs. It ensures you’re always up-to-date, without going through long manual processes.
2. For certification – Clik Cert (Field)
With such a wide scope of work in the plumbing industry, you probably carry out a range of different services for clients. Whether you fulfil work for commercial sites or residential properties, completing forms and paperwork is likely to be a large part of the job.
With certificate apps, you won’t need to worry about filling out the work on a physical certificate. You won’t need to make notes whilst onsite and type up the work later when you’re back in the office. With the right plumbing tools, you can take away those time-consuming processes and fill out and complete paperwork there and then.
Clik Cert (Field) works alongside the Clik Cert (Office) software to streamline your plumbing certification processes. Access unlimited certificates, forms and reports from anywhere. Document everything from TMV maintenance and service checks to Legionella risk assessments and more.
When onsite, you can capture engineer signatures, export and email certificates and work digitally to cut down on paperwork. You have access to your address book details so you can instantly fill in client details whilst working offline.
Clik’s certification software and apps include a wide range of certificate types, including gas, oil, catering, fire and security. So if you offer multiple services, you can access what you need all in one place.
3. For job sheets – Clik Jobs
When you’ve got numerous jobs in the pipeline, multiple sites to get to in one day and a growing list of clients to keep track of, it can be difficult to manage. If this is the case, job sheet apps are the answer to your troubles.
Clik Jobs works with your main Clik Service database in the office to take your jobs further. Engineers receive their jobs on their mobile devices and can work offline from anywhere. No need to carry around physical paper job sheets that can easily get misplaced or damaged.
You also won’t need to keep track of notes to then type up when you get home or back to the office. Fill out details there and then, capture customer signatures and speed up the admin processes.
4. For collaborating – SharePoint
It can be frustrating when you’re trying to work on a spreadsheet or Word document at the same time as a colleague when storing documents locally. This can cause duplicated data and potentially lost work. Sending the work back and forth can also take a lot of time.
SharePoint eliminates the back and forth when collaborating. Your work can be stored on your team site so you can edit and access documents on the go. Share news and updates for everyone to see and work in conjunction with other Microsoft products to make collaborating straightforward.
Clik Service integrates with SharePoint so you don’t have to worry about losing important documents or recent work. With Clik Remote, your engineers can view work online and edit live documents whilst onsite. You can see updates in real-time, as well as other users’ comments so that you never miss the most up-to-date version of your work.
5. For communication – Microsoft Teams
Internal communication is vital to ensure all staff are on the same page. Without it, important announcements can be missed and can cause confusion for your team. When your engineers are constantly on the move all the time, it can be harder to organise face-to-face meetings.
With Microsoft Teams on your tablet or mobile device, you can stay in the loop no matter where you are and how long you’re away from the office. Keep in touch with specific groups in your team and video call people in or out of your organisation.
Microsoft Teams also integrates with other software to make processes even more straightforward. Upgraded notifications are coming soon to Clik Service, which will include integration with Microsoft Teams. This will ensure the right people get the right alerts at the right time.
Notifications can be customised to suit your business. These automated alerts can give updates on job sheet changes, alert your accounts team on overdue invoices and highlight breached service level agreements.
There are so many other choices for plumber communication apps. If you use email for both internal and external communication, make sure you have the relevant email client app downloaded too. With everything you need at your fingertips, jobs will be more straightforward and you’ll always be in the loop wherever the work takes you.
6. For taking measurements
With advancing technologies, there are so many ways you can use apps to replace or stand in for your physical tools that take up space in the van. Having your own way to take measurements on your phone is not only convenient, but it also gives you the flexibility to work anywhere, at any time. It’s ideal for emergency callouts or unplanned maintenance visits as you can quickly take measurements in seconds and save them for your records.
7. For route planning
If you’re constantly on the move, route planning is important to keep down petrol prices and save your plumbers’ time. Without route planning, it’s easy to get lost or not be aware of the more direct route, especially when it’s in an area you’re not familiar with. As your business grows, make sure to be prepared for new work and new clients in a number of different locations.
With an app such as Route4Me or Google Maps, you can plan ahead. It can save you countless hours of trying to organise multiple site visits in your head. This way, road works, diversions and other delays are taken into consideration, so you always get to the job on time. You’ll be able to get more jobs done and spend less time in traffic, so it’s beneficial for everyone.
8. For calculating formulas
You can eliminate even more manual processes with plumbing formula apps. This means you can spend less time scribbling down calculations and more time getting more jobs done.
With calculators that are specially curated for plumbers, you have more specific formulas for a broad range of measurements and conversions. All of these are tailored to the work you carry out, so you always have what you need.
Apps such as Plumbing Formulator can calculate over a hundred useful formulas for plumbers and HVAC installers. It has various formulas to calculate dozens of conversions for you easily. From wights of different popes to final temperatures of two bodies of water and much more.
Looking to take your plumbing business to the next level? Stand out from the crowd with certification software for plumbers and gas and oil engineers. Try Clik Cert for free today to see how it can help streamline your paperwork and admin both onsite and in the office.
