In an installation business every hour is either billable, warranty, or lost, and the registration decides which.
A technician who spends the day across four customers produces a payroll figure and four invoice lines, and the second is worth considerably more than the first. Hours that never get attributed to a job do not become invoices; they become margin absorbed silently. That is why installation firms usually discover the value of registration on the revenue side rather than the administrative one.
Principaux enseignements
- Unattributed hours are lost revenue, not just missing admin. The attribution has to happen at the moment.
- Travel between jobs is the number that decides whether a service call is profitable, and it is rarely measured.
- Job attribution must be one tap from that technician’s own schedule, or it gets reconstructed on Friday from memory.
Why is unattributed time a revenue problem?
Because you cannot invoice what nobody recorded against a job.
A technician’s day contains work for several customers, travel between them, a warranty call, and time on a job that overran. If all of that arrives as “Tuesday, 9 hours”, payroll is satisfied and invoicing is guesswork. Somebody in the office reconstructs it, conservatively, and the conservative version is the one that gets billed.
The gap is invisible by construction, you cannot count hours nobody recorded. The way to size it is a comparison: take three completed jobs, compare the labour actually invoiced against the labour that must have been consumed to deliver them, and look at the difference.
How do you make attribution happen without slowing technicians down?
Make it one tap, from a short list that is correct.
A technician shown two hundred open jobs will pick the first plausible one. A technician shown the three jobs assigned to them today picks the right one. Which means the registration app has to know the schedule, and that is the real argument for keeping planning and registration in one system rather than integrating two.
The practical requirements:
- The job list is the technician’s own schedule, not the company’s backlog.
- Switching jobs is one action, because a day contains several.
- It works offline, because customer sites, plant rooms and basements do not have signal. We have covered the behaviour in offline registration.
- Adding an unplanned job is possible on the spot, because the day rarely goes to plan.
That last one is where systems designed for planned work fail. An emergency call inserted at 14:00 has to be registrable without an office intervention, or the technician writes it on a hand and it arrives on Friday.
What does travel time actually cost you?
More than most installation firms measure, and it is the number that decides whether short jobs are worth taking.
| What to measure | Why it matters commercially |
|---|---|
| Travel between jobs | Paid, usually unbillable, and it scales with route quality |
| Travel to the first job | Treatment depends on the applicable agreement |
| Time on site per job | The invoice line |
| Waiting for access | Recoverable only if evidenced |
| Return to depot | Same question as the outbound journey |
| Materials collection | Often unassigned, always real |
A service call that takes forty minutes on site and seventy minutes of travel is a different commercial proposition from what the job sheet suggests. Once travel is measured per job rather than absorbed into a day, route planning and job clustering stop being abstractions.
Whether travel counts as paid working time depends on the journey and the applicable joint committee agreement, commuting to the first workplace is generally treated differently from travel between assignments, and where a technician has no fixed workplace the classification can change. The system’s job is to make travel and work distinguishable so whichever rule applies can be applied.
Should the van register instead of the technician?
Partly, and knowing where it stops matters.
An in-vehicle unit gives a reliable, automatic record of travel with no effort from the technician, which is genuinely valuable in a business where travel is the second-largest time category. What it cannot see is what happened after they walked away from the van, a vehicle stationary since 09:00 says nothing about whether the work finished at 11:00 or 14:00.
Most installation firms end up with the vehicle authoritative for travel and the app authoritative for work and job attribution, with a written rule for disagreements. Decide that at configuration, not at the first dispute. We have covered the combination in can I combine time tracking and vehicle tracking.
Quels sont les systèmes que cela doit atteindre ?
Two, and installation firms usually already run both.
The job or service ERP, so hours reach the invoice. Suivo has implemented integrations with Robaws, Business Central (via Norriq), Odoo and Easycom, all of which appear in Belgian installation and technical-services businesses.
Planning, so the plan and the actual can be compared. Integrations with Solvice and Nomadia Field Services cover route and field-service scheduling, and the comparison between planned and actual duration is what makes future estimates better.
Questions fréquemment posées
How do technicians register hours against the right job?
By picking from their own schedule at the moment, in one tap, rather than reconstructing the day later. The list has to be short and correct, a technician shown the company backlog will pick the first plausible entry, and that error is invisible until someone queries an invoice.
Is travel time billable in an installation business?
Whether it is billable is a commercial decision; whether it is paid comes from the applicable joint committee agreement, and travel to the first job is usually treated differently from travel between jobs. Either way it has to be measured separately, because a forty-minute job with seventy minutes of travel is not the job the job sheet describes.
Can a technician register a job that was not planned?
They must be able to, on the spot. Emergency calls inserted mid-afternoon are normal, and a system that requires an office intervention to register one guarantees those hours arrive late and approximate, usually on Friday, usually understated.
Does time registration work in a basement or plant room with no signal?
It should buffer locally and sync when the connection returns, timestamped at the moment of the action. Ask for a demonstration in flight mode rather than a description, because installation work happens in exactly the places coverage fails.
Ce que cela ne résout pas
The system does not decide what is billable. It records where the time went, accurately and attributed; what you charge for is a commercial policy.
It does not tell you whether travel is paid working time either. That comes from the applicable joint committee agreement and the arrangement in place.
And it does not improve route planning by itself. It supplies the actual durations that make planning better, which is the input rather than the outcome.
Suivo registers by app, in-vehicle unit, QR, NFC and badge including offline, attributes hours to jobs and cost centres at the point of registration, and integrates with Robaws, Business Central, Odoo, Easycom, Solvice and Nomadia Field Services. It is not a payroll engine and does not calculate wages.
Next step: the installation services overview covers jobs, travel and invoicing together.
Related: What a payroll export must contain
