Progress Payments

I’ve been running into something with Jobber that I’m curious if other contractors are struggling with too. Jobber seems mainly designed around industries like pest control or lawn maintenance — companies that don’t usually run really high line item prices or multi-stage projects off a single quote.

For trades like mine (electrical contracting), projects are often big and spread out — think full home rewires, panel changes with remodels, or multi-phase installs. On those kinds of jobs, you can’t realistically bill everything upfront. We need to take progress payments as the work moves along.

Here’s what I’ve been forced to do:

Create a quote for the full project and get the client to approve it.

Save the quote, don’t schedule it.

Start the job and then build separate invoices for progress payments.

The problem is that this really messes with the books. Jobber ends up showing the full approved quote plus all the separate invoices and payments. That doubles the client value and makes reporting messy. It also makes it harder to show the client a clear record of what’s been billed versus what’s left.

My idea for a fix: Add a “progress payment” option to quotes/jobs/invoices — basically the same way deposits work now. On a quote or job, we could set a deposit, and then later go back in and log progress payments against the total without closing the job. That way the system would track everything cleanly, clients could pay stage-by-stage, and we wouldn’t have to hack around the software to make it work.

Also while I’m at it — one other small request: on desktop we can add text-only line items to quotes, which is amazing for breaking them into sections or adding explanations. On mobile, we can’t. It would be a huge time-saver if that feature was available in the app, too.

So — is anyone else having this problem with progress payments in Jobber? Would this kind of solution help your business too?

– TJ Maddock
Odinson Electric, LLC