Ledgr/Documentation/Job cards

Job cards

Watch the lesson: Run a job card from parts to invoice (2:07).

For work done for a customer rather than sold off a shelf — a repair, an installation, a callout. Parts and labour go onto the job as they happen, and the invoice is the job.

The five tabs

Raise a job

1. Job Cards → New Job
2. Pick the customer and describe the work

   What was reported, and what you have been asked to do. This is what the customer reads on the invoice later, so write it once and write it properly.

3. Assign it

   Who is doing it, and when it is scheduled for.

A job can also be raised from an accepted quote, which carries the quoted amount across with it. That is the figure the "over quote by…" column is measured against, and it is the first half of a chain that runs quote → job → invoice with all three links joined.

Raising a job card works with no connection — it queues and sends itself later, because raising the card is exactly what happens on somebody's driveway. So do the hours you log on it. What happens to the job — issuing a part, converting it — does not, and that split is deliberate.

The board

One column per status, in the order a job moves through them: Draft, Scheduled, In progress, On hold, Awaiting parts, Completed, Invoiced and Cancelled. Drag a card to move it; the columns it may go to light up, and one it may not is refused with both statuses named. Awaiting parts earns its own column because it is the state jobs get stuck in silently: the technician is waiting, the customer thinks you are working, and nobody is looking at it. Completed is the one to keep empty — it is finished work not yet invoiced, and the reason margin leaks when it is not.

Invoicing and cancelling are never a drag, because both do something besides move the card: Convert to invoice raises the invoice, and cancelling returns the parts. Use the buttons on the job. An invoiced or cancelled card is finished and does not move.

The Jobs list is searched and filtered on the server, so a job from last year is as findable as one from this morning.

Parts, labour and other costs

• Parts are issued from stock against the job. The stock movement happens at the point of issue, so what is in the van is out of the storeroom in the figures as well as in fact. This one needs a connection — see why.
• Labour goes on as hours at a rate, and the rate comes from the person's technician defaults (Reports → Technician defaults) rather than being typed each time. If you already log hours in time tracking, they can come from there — approved hours only.
• Travel is priced at the SARS rate for the year of the trip — R4.95 per kilometre for 2026/27 — so a job card and the same trip captured in expenses agree.
• Other costs — subcontractors, consumables, a callout fee.

Putting a real purchase on a job

The subcontractor's invoice and the parts you bought in for the job are already in Ledgr as an expense or a bill. Allocate them to the job rather than retyping them, and the job's cost becomes what the business actually spent instead of a re-keyed subset of it.

Each line carries what it cost you and what you are charging, which is where the job's margin comes from. A job that ran at a loss should be visible while you can still do something about the next one.

Dispatch — who is doing what, and when

The Jobs list answers "what is outstanding". Dispatch answers the different question a supervisor asks first thing in the morning: is the week actually possible? It lays the scheduled jobs out per technician per day and, above all, counts the double-bookings — the same person promised to two customers in the same slot, which is the failure a list view cannot show you and a customer finds out about by waiting.

Jobs with no date yet are held in their own group at the bottom rather than left out, because an unscheduled job is the one most likely to be forgotten.

Assigning somebody to a job emails them, if that switch is on — see notifications. Re-saving the same team emails nobody, and assigning yourself emails nobody.

Photographs — before and after

Photographs are what a disputed invoice actually rests on, so a job holds up to 24 of them, each tagged Before, After or General. Before and after are printed as their own strips on the customer's job report, which is what makes the tag worth setting rather than a filing detail.

• An after photo is refused while the job is still a draft or merely scheduled, because it is almost always a mis-tagged before.
• General is the default — a serial plate, a meter reading, the model number on the back of the unit — so a quick shot is never mis-filed as evidence of finished work.
• A caption can be added, and it appears both in the app and on the report.
• Photographs are evidence, not lines: they carry no price and gate no billing.

Service contracts

A monthly generator service, a quarterly inspection, an annual fire check. Set the cadence and the start date once, and each visit becomes an ordinary job card when it falls due — which is what keeps the costing, the invoice, the job report and the WIP balance working exactly as they do for any other job.

1. Job Cards → Contracts → New contract
2. Pick the customer, How often and First visit due

   The first visit's date is the one every later visit is counted from, and it is tracked rather than drifting: a monthly contract whose first visit falls on the 31st gives 31 January, 28 February, then 31 March — the short month does not quietly move every later visit to the 28th. Ends on is optional; leave it blank for a contract with no end date.

3. Let it raise the visits

   Each falls due on its own date and appears on the board as a scheduled job. A contract that has fallen behind owes every visit it missed, not just the most recent one.

Sign-off on the customer's screen

Finishing a job captures the customer's signature on the device — an actual drawing surface, not a tick box — along with who signed and when. It appears on the job report and on the invoice raised from the job: the copy you download, the one emailed to the customer and the one they open from their link all carry it, with the signer's name, the date and the job card's number.

The signature is deliberately not required to complete a job. A signature pad that blocks completion is one people work around, which leaves the business with a false proof of work instead of an honest one. Ledgr would rather record that nobody signed.

Invoice the job

Converting a finished job raises a real invoice through the invoicing engine, with parts as product lines and labour as service lines. The invoice is linked back to the job, so a query three months later is answered from the job card rather than from memory.

Reports

Open jobs, work in progress, average margin and what is waiting to be invoiced. Work in progress is the number worth watching: it is cost you have already incurred and not yet billed, and on a bad month it is most of your cash.

Margin is only as honest as the cost rates behind it. Each person's charge rate and cost rate are set under Job Cards → Reports → Technician defaults, and new labour lines fill in from there. A person with no cost rate set is reported as not set rather than as zero, because an unset rate would otherwise show every job at 100% margin.

Common problems