Case study, Trades and field services
Two days a week of retyping, gone
Job sheets came off site as photographs. Somebody typed them into the accounts system by hand, around two days a week. We joined the two ends together and left the crews alone.
A regional building services firm · 14 May 2026
- Retyping
- 13 hrs/week → 0
- Invoice lag
- 9 days → same day
- Built in
- 3 weeks
The job that kept coming back
Twelve engineers, four vans, roughly ninety jobs a week. At the end of each job an engineer filled in a paper sheet, photographed it, and sent it to the office WhatsApp group.
In the office, one person opened each photo, read it, and typed the details into Xero: customer, site, hours, parts, rate. Then filed the photo in a Drive folder named after the month. Then, on Friday, chased whichever engineers hadn’t sent theirs.
It took about thirteen hours a week. It also meant invoices went out an average of nine days after the work was finished, because the typing was always the last thing anyone got to.
Nobody thought this was a good use of anyone’s time. But the alternative everyone had been sold, meaning new field-service software, tablets for the vans and retraining twelve engineers who liked the paper, cost more than the problem, and would have taken months.
What we actually changed
We changed nothing about the engineers’ day. They still fill in the paper sheet. They still photograph it. They still send it to the same group.
What changed is what happens next.
- The photo is picked up automatically and read. Handwriting included, and the sheets are a fixed layout, which makes this far more reliable than it sounds.
- Customer, site, hours, parts and rate are pulled out as fields.
- Anything the extraction isn’t confident about is held back and posted to a Slack channel with the photo attached, so a human answers one question instead of typing thirty.
- Everything else goes straight into Xero as a draft invoice, with the photo attached to the record.
- At 4pm each day, any engineer who hasn’t sent a sheet for a completed job gets a message. Not from a person.
The office still approves every invoice before it goes out. That was deliberate. Automating the typing is uncontroversial; automating the decision to bill a customer is not, and we didn’t need to.
What it looks like now
| The job | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Typing job sheets | ~13 hrs/week | none |
| Chasing engineers | Friday afternoon | automatic, daily |
| Time to invoice | 9 days average | same day |
| Sheets that need a human | all of them | roughly 1 in 8 |
The thirteen hours didn’t turn into thirteen hours of nothing. It turned into the office manager doing the credit control that had been slipping, which is worth considerably more than the automation costs.
What we run now
The system has been live for eleven months. In that time:
- Xero changed an API response shape in September. We caught it from the monitoring, fixed it the same morning, and the office found out from the monthly report.
- The firm added a second trading entity in January. That was a change we made under the monthly fee, not a new project.
- One engineer’s phone compresses photos differently to everyone else’s. That took a fortnight to notice and an afternoon to handle.
None of those three things would have been anyone’s job if we had handed over a folder of workflows and left.
Recognise any of that?
Tell us which part sounds like your week. One email is enough to start.