Pro Tips: Contract Labour Rates and Automatic Payments

Here's a review of some product releases since we left off. As usual, I'll be cherry picking those I think are most useful and/or relevant breaking down how you can use them in your business. Over the next couple of months we'll be working our way up to the present.

Labour Rates? Please be more specific

Negotiating custom labour rates for certain contracts and sites is common practise, especially for maintenance businesses. In exchange for becoming the supplier of choice for on-call work, clients will want to know up-front what they can expect to pay, and use the promise of ongoing work to negotiate a lower rate.

Previously, this was only possible at the customer level. But now, labour rates can be specified for certain sites (especially common in the mining industry) and contracts.

Site-specific labour rates can be set in the Rates tab of the site card file, while customer contracts are set under the customer file.

If you've never used the contracts feature in simPRO, I recommend it for anyone with a maintenance agreement, whether planned or reactive, formal or informal. To set them up, go to the Rates tab of the customer card file. Here you can enter the contract start and end date, contract value, and other details, including material markup, labour rates and maintenance prebuild prices.

Creating a customer contract in simPRO

Pro tip: Always keep the customer name at the start of the contract name.

Why? Because when you create a new job or quote, you will have to enter the contract name into the customer field. simPRO treats the contract like an alias. For that quote or job, it will use all the regular customer info, plus any settings in the contract, such as custom labour or material rates. So if you type in the customer name and the contract doesn't pop up, it's likely to be missed.

By retaining the customer name at the start of the contract name you be sure that it appears in search results when creating a new job.

Include the customer name in the contract name so it will be available to select when creating a quote or job in simPRO.

While we're riffing on contracts, why even bother entering them in to simPRO? Because setting them up correctly just once can help prevent the following potential facepalms:

• Invoicing the customer for the wrong amount.

• Forgetting to renew your contract once it expires.

• Creating recurring jobs and/or invoices after the contract ends.

• Maintaining assets which are no longer under contract.

• "Hey, Rebecca, do you remember what the rates are for ABC Company?" "Um, I think I had it in my emails somewhere. No, wait. Maybe ask Frank." "Frank...."

Remember, anything that is a rule should be automated where possible. This is what computers are for.

Which leads into the next topic...

Shut up and take my money

Perhaps you have customers on a contract, such as a Service Level Agreement (SLA), or a software subscription, or alarm monitoring, which is billed on a regular basis for a set amount.

You could create an invoice each time from scratch, but that would be... not smart.

It would be better to create a recurring invoice and simply send an identical invoice each period from a template.

But even better than that would be enabling automatic invoicing so simPRO can send it for you.

And now, if you have Square or Stripe enabled in simPRO you can do even better than that.

First, open the customer file and make sure they have access to the customer portal. Just click on the Settings tab of their card file and click the big green button next to their portal details. This will send them a log in email.

Now when they receive an invoice with automatic invoicing enabled, they will see a button at the top of the window allowing them to set up auto-pay. For as long as that recurring invoice runs, Strip or Square will automatically deduct your payment amount from their account.

If you're already using recurring invoices, why not make it easier to get paid? It doesn't take long to set up, and then it's on autopilot. Plus, if it's linked to a contract expiry date you won't have to worry about remembering to cancel it, as simPRO will stop the payments automatically when the contract expires.

We have some awesome new products planned for release later in 2025, and you'll be hearing about them very soon.