For facilities and property maintenance contractors
Forty-one jobs this month. None of them big enough to lose money on.
Reactive maintenance lives or dies on the admin cost of a two-hour job. Worksted takes the ticket to a booked, evidenced, invoiced record with as few steps as that is worth — and then tells you what the whole portfolio is making.
Worked example
- The business
- A 25-person property maintenance contractor
- The job
- Reported leak under the kitchen sink, unit 12
- The site
- One landlord, 60 tenancies across 23 addresses
One ticket from a landlord’s portfolio — raised, dispatched, evidenced and billed the same day, among forty others.
One record, all the way through. The docket keeps up on its own — scroll, and watch it fill in. Marked in time since the ticket landed.
A ticket becomes a job in about a minute
Against the unit, not the building. The address is already there and so is what somebody wrote about getting in — the key-safe number, which entry, the dog. Nobody re-types it and nobody rings to ask.
Leak under kitchen sink
Needs scheduling- Client
- Landlord · 60 tenancies
- Site
- Unit 12 — key-safe at the meter box
Off the queue and onto somebody, with a window
The board opens on what still needs scheduling. Drag it onto a lane, pick two hours instead of a guessed all-day slot, and the tradesperson has it on their phone before you have closed the tab.
This week
4 on siteSione
Unit 12 — leak11–1
Rhys
Unit 7 — door closer1–2
Kat
Shop 3 — tube heater9–11
Mere
L2 amenities — tap11–12
Evidence, because the landlord was not in the room
Photos before and after, the hours as they run, and your own completion form filled in standing in the kitchen. It attaches to this unit’s job, so a question in six months has an answer rather than a recollection.
The part gets approved before it gets bought
A purchase order raised at the counter waits on somebody with the authority to say yes. Approved, it goes to the supplier as an order from your business — not on a tradesperson’s own card, reimbursed three weeks later.
Purchase order
Awaiting sign-offPlumbing & hardware supplies
PO-1129 · raised by Sione, at the counter
$90.75
inc. GST
Nothing is bought until this is approved
Billed while it is still fresh
The hours are already on the job, so the invoice is a review rather than a reconstruction. Tax Invoice, ABN, GST on its own line and your bank details — the same on the two-hour job as on the twenty-thousand-dollar one.
Tax Invoice
INV-4462
Your maintenance business · ABN 66 302 447 918
BSB
033-158
Account
4419 2276
The whole account, as one figure
Every job you have done for that landlord adds up to revenue, cost, margin and a count. Forty-one tickets is a lot of activity; this is the number that tells you whether it was worth having.
The job, start to finish
JOB-4462
Landlord portfolio · unit 12
Raised from a ticket
Access notes already on file
9:02am
Booked
Two hours, not a whole day
11:00–13:00
Labour
1 h 45 m on site
$630.00
Parts
Approved before the supplier run
$418.00
Invoiced inc. GST
$2,079.00
This client, so far
One revenue, cost and margin
41 jobs
Margin
44.6%
$842.00
Reactive ticket — unit 12
Small money, priced properly. An attendance fee, the part, the making good and the hours — off the same price book as every other ticket, so forty of them are consistent without anybody policing it.
Your price book, your wording, your rates. Lines copy onto a quote the moment they’re added, so putting your prices up next month never rewrites what you sent last month.
A client on agreed rates gets those rates, baked into the line rather than remembered by whoever built the quote.
JOB-4462
Landlord portfolio · unit 12
Ex GST unless shown
Attend and diagnose, first 30 min
1 ea
$89.00
Mixer tap cartridge, ceramic
1 ea
$48.50
Door closer, overhead surface
1 ea
$214.00
Make good plasterboard and paint
1.5 h
$187.50
Maintenance tradesperson
1.75 h
$157.50
What a landlord expects you to be able to produce.
Not for one job — for any of the forty-one, picked at random, months later. You write each rule once and it raises itself against the right people and the right addresses, so the paper trail is a by-product of the work rather than a project.
- Tenant access authority
- Put it on the address once and every future ticket there raises it by itself. The office clears it, and the tradesperson can see it is cleared before they get in the van.
- Asbestos register acknowledgement
- A document obligation on jobs at the older stock, handled by the office rather than delegated to whoever happens to be on the ticket.
- Working-at-heights ticket
- Sits on the tradesperson. Set it to block and they simply cannot be booked onto the roof job — the office is told who was skipped, by name, at the point of booking.
- Post-work condition photos
- A photo field on your own completion form. It is filed against the job at that unit, which is exactly where a dispute six months later goes looking.
You write these rules yourself, once — what evidence, who it’s for, when it’s due and what it holds up. From then on they raise themselves.
Three ways this work loses money.
Not software problems — facilities and property maintenance contractors problems. Here is what Worksted does about each of them.
Forty small jobs and no time to bill them
The admin on a two-hour job is most of what it costs you. When the hours and the photos are already on the job, invoicing is a review rather than an evening of reconstruction.
The part somebody bought on their own card
Spend that nobody approved and nobody can trace turns up as a reimbursement with no job attached. An order that waits for a yes puts the decision — and the job it belongs to — on the record before the money moves.
The client who looks busy and is not
Volume is not margin. Read revenue, cost and margin across everything you have done for that landlord and you can tell the difference between a good account and a lot of driving.
Run a week of tickets through it.
Fourteen days. Put one portfolio in, raise a handful of jobs against it, and see what the account looks like from above.
Not quite your line of work