Handymen
What belongs on a handyman invoice
Four things that decide whether a handyman invoice gets paid or gets a phone call. The generator further down opens with the lines already in it.
Bill in half-days or hours, and say which. The whole trade runs on “can you also just…”, and an invoice that says “6 hrs” against a list of nine small jobs is far easier to accept than one that says “day rate” against the same list.
List every job, however small. It is tempting to fold four ten-minute tasks into “sundry works”; the customer remembers four things being fixed and reads one line, and the gap between those two is where the discount conversation starts.
Materials you picked up on the day should show the shop and the item. Nobody disputes £8.40 of screws when it says what the screws were for.
If a job turned out to be bigger than the phone call suggested, the invoice is not the place to break that news. Say it during, and let the invoice confirm what was already agreed.
Get a name and an address for the invoice, not just a phone number. Half of this trade is booked by text and paid in cash, and the moment a customer wants it for a landlord, an insurer or a tax return, an invoice with no addressee is not a document. It costs one question at the door.
The lines below are real work at plausible quantities, and deliberately carry no prices. A price is a local fact about a local market, and a made-up one would be worse than none.