Eight trucks' worth of supply-house paper, sorted to the job the moment it exists.

JJ Galvin Electric has run eight trucks out of Newton, Massachusetts for years, two electricians to a truck. This is not a story about growing. The trucks, the crew, and the supply-house accounts were all in place and working. What was not working was the paper those eight trucks generate: an invoice in the inbox and a receipt in the truck for every purchase, and the hours it took to make sense of them.

The shop

Eight trucks and sixteen electricians. Most material comes across the supply-house counter on house accounts, and the books are kept in QuickBooks. Every purchase produces paper twice: the receipt handed over at the counter, which rides back in the truck, and the supply-house invoice for the same purchase, which arrives by email.

Before

The supply-house invoices landed in the inbox as emailed PDFs. The receipts came back in the trucks, or in folders, or not at all until someone went looking. Sixteen people buying material every week meant neither pile ever stopped, and the two piles had problems that fed each other.

The first was duplicates. A receipt in a truck and an emailed invoice for the same purchase look like two purchases until someone lines them up, one from a folder and one from the inbox. With hundreds of pieces of paper a month, that lining-up was slow and never quite certain, and the wrong call in either direction meant either paying the supplier twice or billing the customer for material that was already on another invoice.

The second was the sorting. Every purchase had to be matched to the job it was for and then entered into QuickBooks by hand, line by line. None of that is skilled work, but all of it has to be done by someone who knows the jobs, which in an eight-truck shop means the owner or the one person in the office. It was the kind of task that eats an afternoon a week and gives nothing back.

What changed

The paper is handled once, where it is created, instead of again and again at the office.

• The receipt is photographed at the counter. RevnuPros reads the supplier, the invoice number, and every line item from the photo, whatever the supply house's layout looks like.
• The emailed invoice goes in the same way. The PDF from the supply house is dropped into the same upload, a batch at a time, and read exactly like the receipt: supplier, invoice number, line items, job.
• It files itself to the job. The job number printed on the ticket is matched to the job in RevnuPros. Anything the app cannot read, or that does not add up, is flagged for a person instead of guessed at.
• Duplicates are caught for you. The receipt from the truck and the emailed invoice for the same purchase, or the same ticket photographed twice, are recognised as one purchase rather than two. The guessing is gone.
• Every purchase carries two switches. Paid to the supplier. Billed to the customer. Until the second one is flipped, the purchase sits in amber on its job where nobody can miss it.
• The books get one export, already sorted. Every line carries its job, supplier, invoice number, and amount, so what goes to QuickBooks is a single file instead of an afternoon of keying.

What it comes down to

Nothing about the work changed. The trucks still buy what the job needs, at the counters they always used, on the accounts they always had. What changed is that the record of each purchase is made once, at the moment it exists, by the person holding the receipt, and lands on the right job with its duplicates already caught. The afternoon of sorting and keying is the part that went away.