From work order to invoice: what gets recorded at every stage of field work

A service visit produces billable work, used parts and travel costs. Recording them against the right work order during the visit lets the invoicing team check the work and agreed prices in the same records. This guide covers the information needed from order to invoice.

Print the service report at the end of this guide and take it to the visit. Record findings, work performed, parts used and follow-up work.

Six stages and what each one leaves to the next

1. The contact and the work order. The job gets its own identifier, a customer, a site and a billing basis.
2. Scheduling and choosing the technician. The order gets a visit: a day, a time, a technician and the arrival window promised to the customer.
3. The visit on site. Work hours, parts used, kilometres driven, photos, readings and the customer’s sign-off.
4. Review and approval. For every line, someone decides whether it is billed.
5. The invoice. Approved hours, parts and travel on one invoice.
6. The payroll data. The same hours by entry type to payroll.

The stages are the same chain whether the job comes from a phone call, from a service agreement’s schedule, from an approved quote or from an on-call callout. In contract maintenance the first stage simply arises from the agreement’s service interval instead of from a person.

What goes on the work order

Record the agreed work and billing terms on the work order. Start with these six details.

If the price was agreed on the phone, the agreed wording goes on the order as it was said to the customer: a fixed sum, an hourly rate, an estimate or a capped price. An estimate and a capped price are different promises, and that difference is exactly what invoices get disputed over.

Access details – the alarm code, the gate code, the location of the key safe – are a field of their own and not part of the job description. They are the customer’s security information, and they belong in front of the person going to the site, not in front of everyone who opens the work order.

Scheduling turns the order into visits

An order and a visit are different things, and the difference is worth keeping clear from the start. One order may take two visits: on the first the fault is located and the part ordered, on the second it is fitted. When the return trip is the same order’s second visit, the hours and parts of both end up on the same invoice, and the customer gets one invoice for one fault.

Scheduling records the technician, the day, the estimated length and the arrival window promised to the customer. The estimated length is not a basis for billing, but without it the day is planned on hope: four two-hour jobs do not fit into a day that has three hours of driving in it.

Record the work done and parts used on the visit

The visit adds actual work, parts and observations to the order. The report can include the following details:

• Start, finish and breaks. Timestamps help check duration. Correct automatic events when needed to match actual working time.
• Work hours by entry type. Weekday work, evening, weekend and travel time are separated already when they are recorded, because they are priced differently both on the invoice and in payroll.
• Parts and consumables. The item, the quantity and the stock location the part actually came from – the warehouse or the van.
• Kilometres driven. From where to where and how many kilometres, according to the agreed way of charging.
• Photos and readings. A photo before and after, and the measured values, are both proof of the work and the starting information for the next visit.
• The customer’s sign-off. The name, the day and what was signed off. If nobody is there, record that and send the report anyway.

Record actual hours, parts and observations as soon as possible during the visit. Customer and contract details can be added when the work order is created, then updated with what happened on site.

Three places where information goes missing

Separate notes. Information on paper or in different apps may not all be transferred. A shared recording location and a visit checklist help ensure hours and parts are included before billing.

Time recorded later. Exact visit times can be hard to recall at the end of the day. Record starts, finishes and breaks during the work where possible. Check automatic records and correct discrepancies before approval.

An unrecorded part. Linking a stock withdrawal directly to the work order makes its use easier to trace. Check billability separately: the part may be included in a contract price or warranty. Stock and billing still need reconciliation.

Record prices agreed over the phone on the order promptly too. The person invoicing can then use the agreed price without further investigation.

Review is a work stage of its own

Before the invoice, someone goes through the visit. The review settles four things: do the hours match the visit’s clock times, are the lines picked correctly from the price list, has each line’s billability been decided (billed, covered by the service agreement, done under warranty), and do the deviations – an estimate exceeded, an extra visit, a broken part – carry a reason that can be told to the customer.

The review deserves a deadline in the same way that approving working time does: the visit is approved within two working days, for instance. The longer the delay, the more certainly the reason has been forgotten by the time the customer asks for it.

Billability is a property of the line, not of the whole visit. The same visit can hold scheduled maintenance covered by the agreement and a repair outside it. If the decision is made at visit level, one of the two is billed wrongly.

What moves from the visit to the invoice

Three items move to the invoice: the work hours, the parts used and the travel. Everything else recorded on the visit – photos, readings, checklist items – is content of the work report and the service history.

Under section 209 e of the VAT Act, an invoice has to show, among other things, the quantity and nature of the goods sold and the extent and nature of the services, the taxable amount for each VAT rate, the unit price excluding tax, and the VAT rate and the amount of tax payable. In field work it is precisely the extent and nature of the service that most often leaves the invoice incomplete: “installation work” says nothing about extent, “service work 2.5 h, repair of a seal leak in the cold room” does. The same section requires the date the service was supplied to be shown, if it can be determined and it is not the same as the date of issue of the invoice – in field work that is the day of the visit, and it is almost always a different day from the invoice date. The whole list of mandatory details is collected in the guide mandatory invoice details.

Two situations concern fixed-price work in particular. Under the Tax Administration’s invoicing guidance, an invoice has to be issued for advance payments, and if the whole consideration was not invoiced in advance, an invoice is issued when the work is completed as well; the clearest approach is to invoice only the amount still outstanding, or to show the earlier advances as a deduction with references. If the price changes afterwards or the sale is cancelled, an invoice has to be issued for that too – issuing a credit note is an obligation, not a courtesy.

The payment period is agreed in the contract. When the buyer is a business, the payment period may exceed 30 days under section 5 of the Act on Payment Terms in Commercial Contracts only if that has been expressly agreed.

The visit’s documentation is the invoice’s voucher

Under chapter 2, section 5 of the Accounting Act, an entry has to be based on a dated voucher that is numbered systematically or identified in a corresponding way and that verifies the business transaction, and the connection between the transaction, the voucher and the entry has to be verifiable without difficulty. An income voucher has to show what was delivered.

Keep a clear link between the invoice, work order and visit documentation. Reports, time breakdowns, photos and customer acknowledgement help establish delivery. A signature is useful but is not the only possible evidence of work. Document corrections with a traceable history.

For VAT purposes, invoices have to be kept for at least six years counted from the beginning of the calendar year following the year to whose calendar month the invoices relate. The obligation to keep them sits with the seller, regardless of who drew the invoices up.

Working time and travel time are settled separately

Under section 3 of the Working Hours Act, working time is time spent on work and time during which the employee is obliged to be at the place of work at the employer’s disposal. Time spent travelling is not counted as working time unless it is at the same time to be regarded as a work performance. Under the same section, sections 10, 13 and 25 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act apply to the employer’s duty to prevent excessive strain from travelling outside working hours.

Whether travel is working time depends on the actual working circumstances, not a freely chosen employer rule. Create consistent guidance that follows the Working Hours Act and applicable collective agreement. Distinguish travel counted as work, other compensated travel time and travel billed to the customer.

The travel billed to the customer and the travel counted as working time for the employee are two separate decisions. The customer may, as agreed, be charged a kilometre rate, a fixed call-out fee or travel time at the hourly rate, and what is charged to the customer does not settle how the time is entered in the working-time records.

The same hours serve the invoice and the payroll data

Visit hours can support both working-time records and invoicing. They need different breakdowns: not all working time is billable, and customer pricing is not the employee’s compensation basis. Keep hours worked, time types and billability as separate data.

In fixed-price work the hours are recorded with the same precision even though the invoice is not built from them. Without the hours the margin on the job is a guess, and the next job like it cannot be priced.

The contract decides

Beyond invoice requirements, working-time, consumer-protection and industry rules may also apply. Agree in writing on the following billing practices before the first visit, within applicable law:

• The billing basis and the price list. Hourly rates by entry type, the basis for pricing consumables, and when the price list is reviewed.
• Minimum charge and billing increment. Whether a started half hour or the actual minutes are billed, and whether a visit has a smallest billable length.
• Charging for travel. Kilometres, a fixed call-out fee or travel time, and whether travel is counted from the depot or from the previous site.
• Response time and on-call. By when someone is on site, what work outside regular working hours costs, and from what moment the clock on the promise runs.
• Payment terms. A payment period over 30 days requires express agreement between businesses.
• Advances and additional work. The advance payment for fixed-price work, and how work outside the agreed scope is approved before it is done.

The collective agreement may in addition have its own provisions on compensating travel time, on on-call duty and on work outside working hours. They govern the relationship between the employer and the employee, not the price charged to the customer, but they are worth checking while the price list is built: a generally applicable collective agreement is followed in a non-organised company too.

Example: one service visit with clock times

A property maintenance company gets a call in the morning: the shop’s cold room is not holding its temperature. The job is billed on time and materials.

Three lines end up on the invoice. The day of the visit is shown as the date of supply, because it is not the date of issue of the invoice.

From the same day, 2.5 hours of service work and the separately recorded driving time under its own entry type move into the payroll data. The payroll data travels in hours; the pricing happens in the payroll system.

Had the same job been done at a fixed price, the course of the day would be recorded with clock times in the same way and the invoice would hold one line with the agreed sum. The hours and the parts would still be recorded, because without them the margin on the job is never worked out.

Checklist

Before the visit is invoiced:

• The work order has a customer, a site and a billing basis, and the price agreed on the phone is recorded in the wording it was said to the customer in.
• The visit has an arrival and a departure time as clock times, not just a length.
• The hours are recorded by entry type and they match the visit’s clock times.
• The parts are recorded as lines and taken from the stock they actually came from.
• The kilometres driven are recorded and the way of charging matches the contract.
• The work report carries the customer’s sign-off or a recorded reason why no sign-off was obtained.
• Each line’s billability has been decided: billed, covered by the service agreement, or done under warranty.
• The service line’s text states the extent and nature of the service in the way section 209 e of the VAT Act requires.
• The date of supply is on the invoice, when it differs from the date of issue of the invoice.
• Earlier advance payments are deducted and the invoice refers to them.
• The payment terms match the contract, and a payment period over 30 days rests on express agreement.
• The invoice and the visit find each other: the invoice line carries a reference to the work order and to the day of the visit, and the work report is kept for the retention period.