For trade associations and chapters (HVAC and HRAI, plumbing, electrical, garage door, landscape and snow), contractor groups, and the accountants, bookkeepers and enrolled agents who serve trade clients.
Talk 1A
From Call to Completed Job: Scheduling, Dispatch and Quoting Habits for Busy Trade Shops
For: Trade business owners, office managers and dispatchers
Length: 20 to 30 min chapter talk, or a 45 to 60 min session
In most trade shops, the job isn't what eats the week. It's the admin around the job: calls that never became appointments, techs waiting on the next address, quotes that sat in someone's truck for three days. This session walks through the full first call to completed job flow and shows where work usually leaks, whether you run on paper, a whiteboard, spreadsheets or software. You'll leave with a simple operating rhythm for intake, scheduling, dispatch and quoting that fits a small or mid-size shop.
- A one-page map of the call to completion flow, with the handoffs where jobs, materials and money most often go missing
- Practical rules for the dispatch board: priority jobs, unassigned work, and waiting on materials vs ready to go
- How to turn quotes around faster using the templates you already have
- A short checklist for evaluating any scheduling or field-service tool, including when not to add software
Talk 1B
Job Done, Money In: Closing the Gap Between the Work and the Payment
For: Trade business owners and office staff
Length: 45 to 60 min session or workshop
Finishing the job is only half the work. Getting paid is the other half, and it's often where cash flow breaks. This session covers the path from completed work order to invoice to payment: why invoices go out late, why they get disputed, and what well-run shops do differently. It's practical and tool-agnostic, built around the everyday questions owners ask: what's incomplete, what's ready to invoice, and what's still outstanding?
- The ready to invoice test: what a work order needs before it can become a clean invoice
- Habits that shorten the time between job completion and invoice sent
- A weekly 15-minute review of incomplete jobs, uninvoiced work and outstanding balances
- How cleaner records during the year make tax time easier with your accountant
Talk 1C
From the Job Site to QuickBooks: Getting Clean Records from Trade-Contractor Clients
For: Enrolled agents, CPAs, bookkeepers and tax preparers who serve trade contractors (for example NAEA chapters and state EA societies). Fits a practice management track.
Length: 45 to 60 min webinar or chapter meeting
Trade contractors often keep their customer and invoice records in field-service apps, on paper or in spreadsheets, and that makes year-end work harder for the people who do their books and taxes. This session explains how contractor operations data can flow into QuickBooks, what an accountant or EA can review on the QuickBooks side, where that flow commonly breaks, and what to ask contractor clients to do each month. The guidance is vendor-neutral. The one live example uses a field-service tool that pushes customers and invoices to QuickBooks. This is not a tax-law session, and the software shown is not accounting software.
- How a contractor's day-to-day work (jobs, work orders, invoices) turns into records you can use
- Where customer and invoice data typically breaks between field software and QuickBooks, and how to spot it
- Questions to ask a trade client about how they schedule, quote and invoice, and what those answers tell you about their books
- A month-to-month record-keeping checklist to hand to contractor clients
