PlumbingBossPro Blog — Plumbing Software

Reports in Plumbing Software: The Questions a Small Shop Should Ask Every Week

Most small plumbing shop owners know roughly how the business is doing. They know when it was a good month and when the bank account is thin. What they often do not know is why. Was it fewer calls, slower payments, or maintenance customers who quietly fell off? Reports are how you find out, but only if you ask them the right questions.

Reports Are Only as Good as the Records

Clean data starts with a clean import, as covered in CSV Import: Moving Your Plumbing Customer List Into New Software. After that, it depends on daily habits.

Reports in PlumbingBossPro pull from the same jobs, clients and invoices the office and techs work in every day. That is the main advantage over a spreadsheet you update on Sunday night: nobody re-enters anything for the numbers to exist. But it also means the reports only reflect what was put in. A call booked on a sticky note is a call the report never sees. A job finished but never completed in the app is work that looks undone.

The first rule of good reports is simple: everything goes through the software.

Question 1: What Did We Get Done?

Start with the work. How many jobs were completed this week, and by which van? Were there skips, and why?

This tells you whether the schedule is realistic. If the repair van keeps leaving jobs undone, it is being overbooked or the calls are running longer than you plan for. If skips keep saying “nobody home,” the night-before alert might not be on for enough customers.

The dispatch board and the Scheduled List give you the day-to-day view. A weekly look across all vans shows the pattern.

Question 2: Who Owes Us Money?

The second question is about cash. Which invoices are open, and which are past due?

For a small shop, this is often the most important number on the page. Work you did and have not been paid for is money you are lending your customers. Look at past-due invoices every week, follow up on anything that has slipped, and ask regular late payers for a card on file. More on that in Invoicing and Card on File: Getting Paid When the Plumbing Job Is Done.

For monthly accounts like property managers and restaurants, check that last month's statements went out and that payments came in.

Question 3: What Maintenance Is Slipping?

The Waiting List answers this better than any report. Open the map and look at the overdue pins, the visits that are past their 7-day grace.

A growing pile of overdue flushes, softener services or backflow tests means maintenance is being crowded out by service calls. That is a scheduling problem worth solving, because maintenance customers who never get their visit stop being maintenance customers. Some shops set aside one van day a week just for clearing overdue maintenance.

Question 4: Which Estimates Are Still Open?

Estimates that were sent and never approved are work you have already priced but not won. Look at the open ones every week:

• Which are less than a week old? Leave them; the follow-up emails are working on them.
• Which are older? A personal text or call from the office can bring them back.
• Which are very old? Close them out so the list stays useful.

Water heater replacements and main line repairs are often big enough tickets that a single follow-up is worth the effort.

Making It a Weekly Habit

Reports help most when they are a routine, not something you open when things feel wrong. A simple weekly review, maybe twenty minutes on Monday morning, covers it:

1. Jobs completed last week by van, and the skips.
2. Open and past-due invoices.
3. Overdue pins on the Waiting List.
4. Open estimates.
5. Any new clients from the website forms and sign-ups.

Write down one thing to fix each week. Over a few months, the small fixes add up: fewer skips, faster payments, fewer lost maintenance customers.

Not everyone in the office needs to see every report. Money numbers are usually for the owner. That is where user roles come in, covered in User Roles in Plumbing Software: Who in the Office Sees What.

What Reports Will Not Tell You

Reports show what happened. They do not tell you why a customer did not approve an estimate, or whether a tech is doing careful work. For that, read the job notes, look at the photos, and talk to your people. The numbers point you to where to look. You still have to look.

To see how reports fit with the rest of the platform, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing software page.