The quote was right. The margin disappeared on site, and you find out at month end
For installation businesses with 2-10 technicians that compare quotes and actual job costs from memory, or never. Hours, van materials and extras recorded from the work report, not rebuilt afterwards.
Do you recognise at least two of these?
- You quote well, but at the end of a job nobody knows whether you made or lost money.
- Technicians' hours are on paper reports, materials on supplier delivery notes, extras in the head of whoever was on site.
- The customer asked for three more things "while you're here" and none of them reached the invoice.
- Material left the warehouse on the van and nobody knows which job it ended up on.
- Quote-versus-actual is an Excel exercise, once a year, for the big jobs only.
If you said yes at least twice, the problem is not the quote: actual costs form on site, one hour and one fitting at a time, and nobody writes them down when they happen.
What not knowing costs you
Do the sums on your own business:
- Unbilled extras: on a €20,000 job, 10% of verbally agreed extra work never written down is €2,000 of margin gone. Three jobs a month makes €6,000 a month.
- Hours rebuilt later: whoever fills in the report at the end of the week rounds down; 30 unrecorded minutes a day per technician is over 100 hours a year each.
- Material without a job: fittings, cable and valves loaded on the van and never booked to a site end up in overheads, and the next quote ignores them.
- The wrong quote repeats itself: if you do not know where you lost, the next offer on the same kind of system carries the same error.
These numbers appear on no invoice, which is why nobody sees them.
What if actual costs wrote themselves while the technician works?
Picture the job like this. The quote becomes the job with one tap: material lines and planned hours. At every visit the technician dictates the work report on the phone, ticks the material used from the van list and records the extras the customer asked for, who signs on the screen. Every line lands on the right job the moment it happens.
What changes for you:
- Open the job and see planned versus actual: hours, materials, extras, margin, while the site is still open, not at month end.
- Extras signed by the customer go on the invoice without arguments.
- Material booked off the van always has a job: the gap between loaded and used is a number.
- The next quote starts from the real costs of the last similar system, not from a guess.
That is how iTER7 works: dictated quotes, jobs, visits with voice work report and signature, per-van stock.
Who already uses it and why you can trust it
The jobs, visits and stock modules run in production in installation businesses in North-East Italy that close work reports and invoices every day, built over fourteen years of custom management software. Three things you rarely find in field-service software:
- Priced per company, not per user: add a technician and pay no more.
- Exportable data at any time, and software installable on your own hosting.
- No multi-year lock-in.
What it costs (after you know what not having it costs)
Launch price list, VAT excluded, per company:
- Basic, €99 per month: calendar, work reports from the phone with photos and signature, customers and installed systems, branded PDF.
- Pro, €199 per month: everything in Basic plus jobs with planned versus actual, voice-dictated reports, per-van stock with QR codes, quotes and electronic invoicing.
- Onboarding, €500 to €1,500 one-off: setup, import from Excel or your old system, technician training.
€199 a month is €2,388 a year: less than one €2,000 extra recovered on a single job.
The sensible next step
Bring your last closed job (quote, delivery notes, reports) to a 30-minute demo with whoever coordinates the technicians: we rebuild it together in iTER7 and you see where the margin went. If it is not for you, you keep the comparison, free.