PlumbingBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Repipe Deposits and Progress Invoices for Bigger Plumbing Jobs

A whole-house repipe, a long sewer line repair or a bathroom where every supply and drain line is being replaced is not a service call. It can tie up a van and a couple of plumbers for days. Billing it like a service call — one invoice at the very end — puts all the risk on your shop. Bigger jobs need a billing plan that matches their size.

Building on the Water Heater Approach

The deposit process for water heater swaps is laid out in Deposits on Water Heater Swaps: Using Invoices to Collect Before the Install. Repipes use the same idea with one addition: progress invoices along the way.

As with deposits, progress billing is your policy. PlumbingBossPro does not set it for you. It gives you estimates, invoices, card on file and online payment on the same client, so the policy is easy to carry out and easy to check later.

Decide the Payment Schedule Up Front

Before the estimate goes out, decide how the job will be paid. A common pattern for multi-day work:

• Deposit at approval to reserve the dates and cover materials.
• A progress payment at a clear point in the work, such as “new lines run and tested, before walls are closed.”
• The balance at completion.

Tie each payment to something the customer can see, not to a date alone. “When the new lines are run and pressure-tested” is easy to agree on. “On Wednesday” is not, if Wednesday got rained out or a wall held a surprise.

Write the schedule on the estimate in plain words. The customer approves it online along with the price.

The Estimate Becomes the Job

In PlumbingBossPro, the estimate is built from your service list: labor, materials, fixtures, access and patching if you do it, and haul-away. When the customer approves it online, the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job. The total the customer said yes to is the total the job works toward.

Estimate templates help here. If you do several repipes a year, save a repipe template with your usual lines and payment wording, then adjust it for each house.

Sending the Deposit and Progress Invoices

Each payment is its own clear invoice:

• “Deposit — whole-house repipe, 1420 Oak Lane, per approved estimate”
• “Progress payment — new supply lines installed and pressure-tested”

Charge the card on file, or let the customer pay online from the customer app. Payments are recorded on the client, so the office can see at a glance what has been paid and what is still to come.

Photos help with progress billing. Before-and-after photos taken in the tech app stay with the job. A photo of new lines in the open wall, sent along with the progress invoice, shows the customer exactly what they are paying for.

The Final Invoice

When the job is done, the tech taps Complete. The final invoice should make the whole job easy to follow: the full price from the estimate, the deposit and progress payment received, and the balance due. Add any approved changes as their own lines with a note, such as “Added: replace hose bib on back wall, approved by homeowner on day two.”

If the card on file is charged at completion, the balance is paid the same day. If the office prefers to review a big final invoice first, set the charge to run on a schedule instead.

Handling Changes Mid-Job

Big jobs grow. A wall hides rotten framing, the customer asks for an extra bathroom line, a fitting behind the water heater is worse than expected. Agree on changes before doing them, and get the approval in writing — a text through two-way texting works and stays with the client. Then add the change as a line on the job. Nobody wants a surprise on the final invoice.

For changes that are large, a new estimate the customer approves online keeps everything on the record.

Check It at Month-End

Multi-day jobs are the most likely to leave loose ends: a progress payment never sent, a deposit not shown on the final invoice. Make repipes part of your month-end review. Look at every big job finished or in progress and check that deposits, progress payments and final invoices line up. The billing reports, covered in Plumbing Billing Reports: What to Look At Every Week and Every Month, make that quick.

For how deposits and progress invoices fit with the rest of plumbing billing, see the PlumbingBossPro plumbing invoicing software page.