Our team collects payments in the field, and this is leading to problems. I just pulled $3k in checks out of one of our guy's van. When they collect payments, they mark them as "PAID" so those jobs are off our board. Often our customers want a receipt as soon as they hand them the money. So what do we do here?
We've tried implementing a policy of check/cash collection, but even then they misplace or forget they collected money.
I wanted to remove the ability for them to make jobs as PAID but it's tied into the editing system. They need to be able to make changes on the fly. I have no idea why this isn't separated. We have over 100k coming in monthly and no office staff.
We had similar issues with checks and cash being forgotten or lost which severely hit our cashflow at times.
The first thing we implemented a few years ago was to provide our techs with a clear plastic envelop sleeve (it's one of those see-through ones with a button closure - see picture below) where they have to put their checks and cash immediately when they get back to their vans/trucks. I know it probably sounds ridiculously simple, but it's worked for us. This way we stopped them from losing checks/cash in pockets and random places in their vehicles; cash can still be a problem, but it tends to be with particular individuals rather than a system issue - for our other techs this has been simple but very effective solution. Everything goes in one place, it can hide under your seat in a locker and you can't forget that something is in it, so long as you check it daily (or whenever your techs return to your depot). It also ensures that you know exactly where it should be, should you need to go get it from the van yourself - in case of sudden illness or injury. When we receive their checks and cash, we simply but it in a plastic money bag with their name on it and then place it in money drawer, or safe if you don't have one (some locked drawer) where only you, a family member or a manager have access to.
Other than that, it takes us an hour to, maybe, an hour and a half every evening to go through their slips and jobs on the system and make sure that everything is accounted for, if anything is missing we can follow it up the next day. I won't say it's not a pain, but it does save us grief later down the line. If they have marked the job as paid on Jobber then they should have recorded the payment method. If you go into your reports in Jobber, under "Financial reports" there's a report called "Transaction List. Using this report you can see every transaction that took place on a given day along with a payment method and even a Check number column (see a screenshot of my test transaction below - mind the UK spelling). You can then download an excel copy of this this report and just filter the date and payment method you want to track. You just have to remember to set options menu, on the top right of the Transaction List page, to set far back you want to look.
The only thing this report won't give you is which tech the job was assigned to which can be an annoyance when you're trying to go through the engineers checks and cash for the day. If you're semi-familiar at Excel you can download the "Invoices" report for a reasonable time period and use Xlookup to fill in a new column on your transactions list report. If you haven't used it before it does take a bit of getting used to using Xlookup, but once you start using it - it's a game changer. Makes life a lot easier when trying to link different report to each other and you don't have the inclination to learn Power BI or something of that sort. There are lots of IT experts with videos on YouTube that can take you through how to use it.
We control the payments at the office. Allowing employees and/or subs to take payments causes way too many internal and external problems if you ask me.
We ONLY have accepted credit/debit payments from inception, just for that reason. It’s also a lot easier to track payments and charge the customers card if they don't pay you. Thats clearly written and stated in our estimates, too.
