Automation for Trades & Crafts Businesses

No, not at all. We set everything up and train your team. The pipelines run in the background and the work continues in the programs people already use. What your business takes on is limited: maintaining the service catalogue and prices, working the clarification list and approving variations. We train two people for that, usually the office manager and a site manager, and leave instructions written in the language of the business rather than the software.

In most cases, yes. We integrate with common trades software such as Lexware, DATEV, lexoffice, Plancraft, openHandwerk and others. Where no open interface exists we work with the export and import formats the programs already provide, for example bills of quantities in GAEB format or the connection to wholesaler systems. If a program cannot do something, we say so up front rather than promising it and improvising later.

This case decides whether the automation is worth anything. Before the billing cut-off the pipeline checks per job whether hours, materials and measurement are complete and shows the gaps with employee and date. If something is missing, the invoice is not written on assumption – the job stays on the list. The reminder goes to the employee, the escalation to the site manager.

No, and it should not. For construction services supplied to other construction businesses the VAT liability can shift to the recipient. Whether that applies in a given case, and whether the required documentation exists, is decided by your tax adviser, not by a workflow. The automation can flag the case, place the required note on the invoice and assign early-payment discounts correctly against incoming payments. The judgement stays with you.

Interim invoices are tracked and accumulated per job. The final invoice deducts the interim invoices already issued and lists them individually so the customer can follow the arithmetic. Before it goes out, a check runs: total of interim invoices, contract value, approved variations and recorded time-and-material hours have to add up. Whatever does not add up goes to the site manager rather than to the customer.

They are recorded the moment they arise – with description, estimated effort, a photo and, where possible, customer confirmation. Until approval the variation sits on its own list and does not flow into the invoice automatically. That list is worked through before the final invoice. This is the point where trades businesses typically leave the most money on the table without noticing.

A starter package with quote and invoice automation starts at €5,000 one-time, projects with multiple system integrations at €15,000. Ongoing tool costs are EUR 50-200/month. The price covers a scope defined up front. If further trades, a wholesaler connection or an additional piece of software come into play, that is quoted as a separate step rather than absorbed quietly.

The engagement is set up as a six-week effort, and a first automation is typically in production within 4 to 8 weeks. We start with one trade and one crew rather than the whole business, and run the new pipeline alongside the existing route. We only cut over once hours, materials and invoice totals agree across several jobs.

Yes. Time tracking, job status, photos, measurement and site reports are designed for use on site, meaning few inputs and no keyboard work. Practice matters here: if an entry takes more than a minute, it stops being made. So we keep mandatory fields deliberately short and pull the rest from the job record instead of from the person entering it.

You maintain price lists and service catalogues yourself, and the automation always reads the current state. What matters is validity: running jobs are billed at the prices that applied when the quote was issued, new quotes at the current ones. Simply overwriting the list creates differences between quote and invoice – which is why the history is kept.

It does not replace tax or legal review and it does not decide warranty questions. It is not a certified interface to DATEV or to any trades software – it uses the documented routes. And it cannot bill what nobody recorded: without a measurement, without a timesheet and without a documented variation the invoice stays incomplete. What the automation does is make that gap visible earlier.