For plumbers
Nobody negotiates a price at 2am.
Emergency work runs backwards from every quoting workflow ever designed: make safe first, sort the money out after. Worksted is built to capture the night as it happens, so the morning conversation is about a bill that can be read line by line.
Worked example
- The business
- An 8-person plumbing business on a 24-hour roster
- The job
- DN100 main failed under the car park — make safe, then repair
- The site
- Aged-care facility, kitchen and laundry off supply
A burst main at 2am — made safe before anyone agrees a price, billed from the logged hours by half past seven.
One record, all the way through. The docket keeps up on its own — scroll, and watch it fill in. Marked in the night, and the morning after.
It is a job before you are out of the driveway
Name, address, what has happened — captured on the phone in under a minute, with the client and the site created as you go. No quote, because there is nothing to quote yet.
Burst DN100 main — make safe
In progress- Client
- Raised from the truck, 02:14
- Site
- Aged-care facility, rear car park
Clock on, and photograph it before you cut anything
One timer, running against this job. Photos of the failed section, the isolation and the water damage go on the job as you take them — and save on the phone whether or not there is signal in a plant room.
On site · 02:41
Clocked onThe bill for the night, from the night — not from memory
Every hour logged on the job pulls straight onto the invoice, at the after-hours rate the plumber picked when they logged it. Parts off the van go on from the price book. It is out before the facility manager has finished their coffee.
Tax Invoice
INV-3391
Your plumbing business · ABN 84 117 202 385
BSB
083-004
Account
5521 8830
Now the money conversation — properly, in daylight
The permanent repair gets a real quote off the price book, on the same job. It goes to the facility manager as a link with no login to remember, and they sign it on the screen. Accepted by lunch.
New quote
DraftingReplace DN100 main, 14 m
14 m
$9,410.00
Reinstate asphalt, saw-cut edge
18 m²
$4,210.00
Paid — and you can see what a bad night is actually worth
Hours and parts landed against the job as they happened, so the call-out has a margin you look up rather than guess at. Part payments sit on the invoice with the balance still showing.
The job, start to finish
JOB-3318
Aged-care facility · rear car park
Raised
No quote — make safe first
02:14
Labour
Two plumbers, after-hours rate
$1,785.00
Materials
Off the van and the 24-hour counter
$436.00
Invoiced inc. GST
$4,532.00
Repair quoted
Sent 09:20, accepted by lunch
$16,850.00
Margin
46.1%
$1,899.00
Do-and-charge — overnight make safe
A call-out fee, hours at the rate they were worked at, and what came off the van. Built from what was logged on the job, so every line has a time and a person behind 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-3318
Aged-care facility · rear car park
Ex GST unless shown
After-hours call-out, first hour
1 ea
$285.00
Plumber, after-hours rate
5.5 h
$968.00
Excavate and expose DN100 main
2.5 h
$425.00
DN100 PVC repair coupling
2 ea
$156.00
Vac truck, spoil and water removal
1 ea
$390.00
What a night job still has to leave behind.
Emergency work gets the least paperwork and needs it the most, because the client saw none of it happen. You write each rule once — what evidence, who owes it, what it holds up — and the phone asks for it on the job.
- Make-safe photos before anything is cut
- A photo field on your own make-safe form, filled in on the phone. It is the difference between "the slab was already wet" and an argument you cannot win six weeks later.
- Compliance certificate for the repair
- Set it to hold the job being marked done. The work is not finished when the trench is filled, and the record should agree with that.
- Backflow prevention test record
- Attach it to this job by hand from the job screen when the site needs one. It is not a form somebody has to remember to email in.
- Restricted plumbing work registration
- Sits on the plumber. Someone whose registration has lapsed is refused when the office tries to book them onto a visit — before they are standing at the job.
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 — plumbers problems. Here is what Worksted does about each of them.
The hours nobody wrote down
Two plumbers, five and a half hours, remembered on Friday as "about four each". Clock on against the job and the hours are logged as they happen — including the second person who turned up at 3am.
A 2am job billed at the day rate
Your after-hours rate is on the rate card, picked when the time is logged, and frozen onto the invoice line when it is billed. It stops being something the office has to catch.
The bill that turned up on Friday
A do-and-charge invoice raised the same morning gets paid; the same invoice four days later gets queried. The hours are already there, so building it is minutes rather than an afternoon.
Run one call-out through it.
Fourteen days. Raise a job from a phone, clock on, and see how much of tomorrow morning is already done.
Not quite your line of work