Plumbing job management software: the 28-day gas clock

Twenty-eight days. That is what regulation 36(6) of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 allows for the record to reach each existing tenant, and the count starts on the date of the check. A date only you hold, on a document only you produce.

Plumbing job management software is worth paying for when it holds dates like that one; quoting, scheduling and photographs a diary and a phone will manage badly but will manage. A record that goes out on day 30 is your customer in breach, with your name on the paper that proves when the clock started.

Send it the same evening, not on Friday

Email the record the day of the check and the landlord has all 28 days; batch the paperwork to Friday and four are gone already.

In Zirko the record, the photographs, the signed site report and the invoice sit on the same job, so sending is a consequence of finishing rather than a separate act of remembering. The next visit goes on the planning board twelve months out — the whole recurring-revenue mechanism of a landlord book in one step. What the record itself has to carry, and why a late check does not buy a later anniversary, is in nine items, twenty-eight days, and the rule that stops the date drifting.

Plumbing and heating software for five trades, not one

In the UK this is not one trade. Behind the word stand the plumber, the heating and ventilation engineer, the gas service technician, the refrigeration and air-conditioning installer and the heat pump engineer — different work, the same week of paperwork, and for gas the same register.

Zirko is not on the Gas Safe Register and cannot be: the registration and the record are yours. What a job management system can do is keep the appliance, the date, the engineer and the document attached to each other.

The 5 percent most quotes never reach for

This is where plumbing estimating software in the UK earns or loses your customer the price difference. Renovation of a dwelling empty for two years or more is a 5 percent job, and the materials follow the work — the boiler, the cylinder, the radiators, the tiles. On a £14,000 install that is £700 of VAT instead of £2,800.

A tool that holds one rate per document cannot price that job at all without splitting it. Zirko carries a rate and a tax category on every line and refuses to finalise a document where the two contradict each other. It does not decide whether the dwelling was empty — you ask at quoting time and keep the evidence on the job file, along with any written end-user statement from a contractor. The rest of the reasoning is in the four clocks a plumbing business runs on.

Thirty days for the invoice, and the clock behind it

Regulation 13 of the VAT Regulations 1995 is short: the invoice is due within 30 days of the supply, not of the day the job sheet came back from the van. Nothing bounces on day 40, which is why emergency-callout businesses breach this clock most.

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. The quote becomes the invoice with the line items intact, and hours recorded on site come in as lines that are marked once billed, so the same hour cannot reach two invoices.

What software do plumbers use, and what it should cost

Plans metered by jobs per month punish this trade: twelve landlord checks in a week is twelve jobs, a single bathroom is one, and two businesses with the same turnover end up tiers apart. Zirko counts office seats and field licences instead, never jobs; billing is in euros, for UK businesses too.

Try it on the next landlord check you have booked: record the date, send the record the same evening, put the twelve-month follow-up on the board before you leave. Fourteen days free, full range of functions, no payment details.