Job management software for plumbers: the certificate

Ask an Australian plumber when a job is finished and you get two answers. The water runs — and the certificate is done. They are rarely the same afternoon, and only one of them is what a licensing regulator will look at.

Every state and territory licenses plumbing separately, gasfitting separately again, and each decides for itself what counts as notifiable work and how long you have afterwards. That is a scheduling problem dressed up as paperwork.

Make the certificate a status, not a memory

In Zirko a project status is something you name yourself — tested, awaiting certificate, lodged, closed — including its language and its document template, with no preset stages to squeeze into.

A status change can then set off a rule: a mail to the customer, a reminder to the office, the people involved assigned, files requested from the customer. You set the deadline, the text and the trigger; after every run the log says what was checked and what was sent, and it runs thirty days deep. A dry run goes through the same functions and sends nothing, so you can see a real day before the first mail reaches a customer.

Zirko does not issue or lodge a compliance certificate, and it holds no list of what is notifiable in your state. That judgment belongs to the licensed person who did the work. What it holds is the date, the job, the photographs, the signed report and the invoice, attached to each other instead of to whoever happened to raise them.

The thousand dollar line changes what the invoice must say

An Australian tax invoice does not carry the same fields at every value: above a certain amount the buyer's identity has to be on it, and the threshold catches out businesses that treat every job the same. What has to appear, and where the line sits, is in what has to be on an Australian tax invoice.

Zirko issues document numbers on the server from ranges with no gaps, and an issued invoice can no longer be changed — a correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number. Whether you have to charge GST at all starts earlier than most people think, with a rolling test rather than last year's figure: it is not last year's turnover.

What the plumber records at eleven at night

On the phone it is the same application, not a stripped-down second one. Report templates are built from blocks — date, period, staff, a number field, free text, photo and a signature taken with a finger — and fields you mark as mandatory stop a report being closed half-written. Tap targets are built larger than the usual 44 pixels, because there is a glove in between, and while the application is open hours and job messages can still be written with no signal under a house.

Line items on the phone come from a reading view that carries no amounts at all. That is decided in the database, not in the interface: the apprentice sees assigned jobs and released folders, and nothing about margin.

Hours can only reach one invoice

Hours taken into a document carry an origin marker and leave the selection, so the same hour cannot be billed twice. Twelve time types sit behind that, each with its own effect on target hours and the leave account, and nine of them can be requested from the phone.

When you are the subcontractor on a builder's job the money runs on statutory deadlines that differ in every jurisdiction — eight jurisdictions, eight sets of deadlines.

What it does not do

There is no recurring maintenance generator: annual services are not created for you. There is no dispatch board that optimises routes or forecasts capacity, no map of your vans, and no clock-in with location checking — Zirko does not verify where anybody is standing. And nothing in it is decided by a language model; the automation is eleven fixed rules you switch on one at a time.