For Electricians, Plumbers & Handymen: An Invoice From the Van in 90 Seconds

2026-05-25

The job ends with the customer standing in the doorway. The breaker is back on, the leak is fixed, the shelf is straight. They want to pay — now, ideally — and they want a piece of paper that says what they paid for. You’re still in your work boots, your phone has 12% battery, and the next call is across town.

Whoever invented “I’ll email it tomorrow” hasn’t tried collecting the next morning.

Meet Marius

Marius is an electrician based in Klaipėda. Most days he runs solo: three or four call-outs, anything from a kitchen socket to a small office fit-out. Households want to pay in cash or by bank transfer the same day. The retail clients and the two construction companies he subcontracts to want net-30 and a clean invoice on company headed paper.

The difference between his good months and his bad months isn’t the work — it’s whether he wrote the invoice the same day or “later.” Later means three weeks of WhatsApp reminders from the customer (“did you forget about my invoice?”) and a Sunday evening lost to admin.

The Real Billing Reality

Trade work has a few invoicing quirks the desk-bound businesses don’t have:

The invoice is part of the job. Customer expects it before you leave or within an hour after. Anything later feels unprofessional and gets paid slower.
Materials and labour are separate lines. The customer wants to see what the socket cost vs. what the hour cost, partly to argue, partly to feel informed.
Payment instruction depends on the customer. A household gets “Please pay in cash or to IBAN…”; a B2B client gets “Net-30, bank transfer only.” Mixing them up loses goodwill or loses money.
Materials come from a wholesaler with its own invoice that you need to keep — both for VAT and for working out whether last week’s job was profitable.

Doing all that on a paper book in the van is a recipe for lost invoices, illegible writing, and forgotten supplier receipts.

How Haiku Fits a Trade Business

Three pieces of Haiku — and one optional power feature — cover the day:

Create the invoice from the phone in 90 seconds. Customer details from a previous job get reused; type the materials and hours, hit send, the PDF lands in the customer’s email before you’ve packed up. How to create an invoice.
Set the right payment term per customer. Cash-now for households, net-30 for B2B — the due date is on the invoice and overdue ones surface automatically. Due dates and payment terms.
Upload supplier invoice PDFs as expenses. Haiku reads the supplier name and amount from PDFs and e-invoices, so the cost side of every job is searchable later. Expense tracking.
Optional: program the payment instruction automatically. A short script in the Additional Information Program setting switches between “pay in cash” for households and “net-30 by bank transfer” for B2B customers, based on the buyer name. No more pasting the wrong block. Additional information programming.

Whether the trade is electrical, plumbing, HVAC, carpentry, or general handyman work, the pattern is identical: one invoice per job, materials and labour separated, payment instruction matched to customer.

When It’s Not the Right Fit

If you do fewer than 5 invoices a month and always cash, a notebook is genuinely simpler. If you already work as a subcontractor on a platform that issues invoices for you, you don’t need a second system — though most of those platforms ignore your supplier costs, and Haiku still earns its keep there.

Getting Started in 3 Steps

Sign up free at haiku.lt — 500 invoices on the free plan is more than a full year for most solo trades.
Create one household invoice and one B2B invoice to set the two patterns. Save each customer; next time it’s two taps.
Upload last week’s wholesaler PDF to the Expenses page. The materials become searchable, and at the end of the month you can see which jobs actually made money.

From “Email it later” to “Done before you drive away”

Questions? Email dalius.dobravolskas@gmail.com.