Service charge / first hour fees
Charging the first hour at a callout rate, and why one entry becomes two invoice lines.
Most trades charge more for the first hour on a job than for the hours after it - the first hour covers the drive, the van and the cost of turning up at all. Turn this on and Tradie On The Move does that split for you, on the way to your accounting system. Your staff carry on recording time exactly as they do now.
What it does
A technician records one timesheet entry, the way they always have. When that time is sent to your accounting system it arrives as two lines:
| Line | Charged at | |
|---|---|---|
| The service fee | the first hour of the job | the technician’s service fee labour code, or your default if they have none |
| The labour | everything after it | the labour code the technician chose |
So a 3 hour entry, with the fee set to 60 minutes, arrives as 1 hour at the service fee code and 2 hours at the normal code. Three hours in total, not four - the fee consumes the first hour rather than being added on top.
Tradie On The Move never decides what anything costs. It sends a product code and a number of hours, and your accounting system prices them. That is why the fee is set up as a labour product in your accounting system, priced there at your callout rate - there is no rate to enter in Tradie On The Move, and no second copy of your pricing to keep in step.
Setting it up
There are two halves: a product in your accounting system, and the settings here.
1. Create the product
In Infusion Online, Infusion Elite or Accredo Saturn, create a labour product for the fee - many people call it Callout, Service Charge or First hour - and price it at your callout rate. Then make sure it is ticked in Settings → Labour Codes so Tradie On The Move can offer it.
2. Fill in the settings
Everything lives in Settings → Settings, under Service Charge/First Hour fees. Typing
service fee into the search box at the top brings the whole group together.
- Charge a service fee for the first hour on a job - the master switch. Off by default.
- Default service fee product code - the labour product you created above. Used for everyone who does not have their own set against them.
- Service fee covers this many minutes - how much of the job is charged at the fee. 60 by default.
- Charge the full service fee even on short visits - see short visits below.
- Charge the service fee again -
PerDay(the default) orPerJob. See how often. - Charge a separate service fee for each staff member - off by default, so a two-person job carries one fee.
Full text for each is in the settings reference.
Until a product code is set - either the default above or one against the individual - the feature does nothing at all. Time is sent unsplit, exactly as before, and a warning is written to the log. The switch on its own is not enough.
A different fee for different people
Not everyone on the van costs the same to send. An apprentice, a specialist and a subcontractor can each carry their own fee, charged to their own labour code.
Open Settings → Users, edit the person, and set Service fee labour code - it sits directly under their Labour Codes.
The row only appears once the feature is switched on. There is nothing useful it could say to a business that does not charge a service fee at all.
| What you set | What that person’s fee is charged to |
|---|---|
| Left on - None - (the default for everybody) | the Default service fee product code |
| A labour code of their own | that code, instead of the default |
Three things worth knowing:
- Leaving it blank is not an opt-out. It means use the default, which is what keeps every existing person working exactly as they did before this field appeared.
- It does not switch the fee on for that person. The master setting is still the only switch. Setting a code against somebody while the feature is off does nothing at all.
- You can leave the default empty on purpose. Turn the feature on, set no default, and give a code only to the people you want charged a fee - nobody else attracts one.
Only the code changes. How much of the job is charged, how often, and every exemption work exactly the same way for everybody.
Short visits
The one decision worth thinking about. It only matters when a visit is shorter than the fee period - above that the two behave identically.
Take a 20 minute visit, with the fee set to 60 minutes:
| Charge the full service fee even on short visits | What is billed | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Off (default) | 20 minutes at the service fee code | 20 minutes |
| On | a full hour at the service fee code | 1 hour |
Off treats the first hour as dearer time: you charge more per hour for it, but the customer only pays for the minutes worked. On makes it a genuine minimum: turning up costs an hour whatever happens next.
On is the only setting that can make the hours on the invoice exceed the hours on the timesheet. That is the point of a minimum charge, but it is worth knowing before you turn it on, because it is the thing a customer queries.
How often a job is charged
Two settings, answering two separate questions.
Charge the service fee again - how often over time:
PerDay(default) - once for each day the job is worked on. A job needing three visits on three days carries three fees.PerJob- once only, however long the job runs.
Charge a separate service fee for each staff member - whether each person carries their own:
- Off (default) - one fee for the job, whoever’s time is sent first carries it.
- On - each person attracts their own, within the limit above.
On the default PerDay, a job worked every day for a week carries five service fees. That
is usually what you want - each day you send a van is a day you incur the travel - but it is the
single most important thing to be sure about before switching this on.
Two things are always true, whatever you choose:
- A person who records two entries for the same job on the same day is only ever charged once. Splitting an entry - for a break, or to use a different labour code for part of it - never doubles the customer’s bill.
- An overnight shift counts as one day. A job worked 10pm to 3am is one attendance and one fee, however far past midnight it runs.
Jobs that are never charged
- Admin jobs - leave, training, travel and the like. They are internal and have no customer to bill. (This includes the admin job some tenants call Callout: despite the name, time booked to it is internal.)
- Lunch breaks - an unpaid break is not chargeable time, so the fee is never taken out of it.
- Any job you exempt - see below.
Warranty and recall visits
Going back to put something right is usually not a job you charge a callout for. Right-click the booking on the calendar and choose No service fee for this booking.
Choosing it again clears the exemption. A tick shows beside the option when the booking is already exempt, so you can see the state at a glance.
- It suppresses the fee only. The labour still posts in full at the technician’s own labour code - whether to write that off is a decision for your accounting system, not this setting.
- It covers the job for that day, not just that one booking. A second entry recorded against the same job on the same day is not charged either.
- It can be set before or after the visit, as long as the time has not been sent yet.
What your staff see
Nothing. This is deliberate.
A technician records one entry per job and sees one entry per job, before and after the time is sent. The split is a billing decision, and billing is the office’s concern - a tech visiting four jobs in a day should not have to make sense of eight timesheet rows.
What the office sees
On the Timesheets screen, an entry whose fee has been sent carries a small van marker. Hover it for the breakdown - 3:00 recorded, sent as 1:00 service fee + 2:00 labour.
That marker is there for one job in particular: reconciling your accounting system’s labour lines against Tradie On The Move. When the job shows 1 hour of callout and 2 hours of labour but the timesheet says 3 hours, the marker is what explains it.
The two lines themselves show up in the job’s transactions, read back from your accounting system - which is the right place for them, because that is where they were priced.
Turning it off again
Switching the master setting off stops any new fee being charged, immediately - including on entries that were recorded while it was on but have not been sent yet. Those submit normally, at the technician’s own labour code, for their full hours.
What it cannot do is take back a fee your accounting system has already accepted. If an entry’s fee was sent and its labour had not gone yet, turning the feature off leaves the fee where it is and sends only the labour that is still outstanding - so the job is never billed for both the fee and the hours it came out of.
If something looks wrong
| What you see | Usually means |
|---|---|
| No fee on any job | Default service fee product code is empty and nobody has their own, or the master switch is off |
| No fee on one job | It is an admin job, already charged within the scope you chose, or the booking is exempt |
| No fee for one person only | Their Service fee labour code is set to something your accounting system no longer has - pick a current one, or clear it to fall back to the default |
| The wrong code on the invoice | That person has a Service fee labour code of their own, which overrides the default |
| Fee on a job you didn’t expect | Scope is PerDay and this is a second day, or per-staff-member is on |
| Invoiced hours exceed the timesheet | Charge the full service fee even on short visits is on, and the visit was shorter than the fee period |
| Timesheets won’t send at all | The configured product has been deleted in your accounting system - pick a current one |
See also
- Labour codes - the codes time is charged against, including the one you nominate for the fee
- Users - where a person’s own service fee labour code is set
- Timesheets - the screen the van marker appears on
- Lunch breaks - the other thing that comes off a job’s hours, and why it is never charged a fee
- Settings reference - the full text of every setting