A plumber or electrician doing maintenance and reactive work is rarely paid by the person who reported the fault. The money comes from a property manager, a facilities management contractor or an insurance repair network, in one payment that covers a week or a month of jobs, and the remittance lists work orders, job numbers and property addresses. Your own invoice number is often missing, or sits in a column nobody reads.
It's written for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, fire and building-services businesses and the bookkeepers who look after them. The examples come from the UK and Australia, and the ledger mechanics are the same anywhere. If most of your work is for main contractors on new-build sites, the paperwork is different again, and the guide to self-bills and payment certificates covers it.
The short answer
Record the payer's work order on every invoice when you raise it, copied exactly, in the Reference field in Xero or the message to the customer in QuickBooks Online, and raise one invoice per work order. When the money arrives, work through the remittance row by row, finding each invoice by your number or, where that's missing, by the work order. Settle every fee and short payment before you reconcile the bank line, and query a shortfall before you credit it. The step-by-step guide to reconciling a remittance advice in Xero covers the underlying clicks.
Why the remittance quotes their number, not yours
Reactive work starts in the payer's system, not yours. A tenant reports a leak, the property manager raises a work order, and the job reaches you with a number already attached. By the time you invoice, the payer has been tracking that job for days under its own reference, and its payables team approves your invoice by finding the work order, not by reading your invoice number.
So the remittance is built from their records. The work order or job number comes first, then the property or site, and then your invoice number if their system captured it at all. The payer is describing the payment in the terms it manages the work in, and translating it back to your invoice numbers is left to you.
Three payers, three kinds of remittance
Property managers and agents
In Australia, a real estate agency pays maintenance invoices out of its trust account on the owner's behalf, and a UK letting agent does the same from its client account. One payment can cover jobs at a dozen properties for a dozen different owners, released on the agency's own disbursement cycle rather than your payment terms. The remittance usually lists each property address with a work order number and an amount, and sometimes the agency's own reference for your invoice.
The twist is that the payer isn't the debtor. Your invoice may be addressed to the owner, care of the agency, while the money comes from the agency, so a search by the payer's name finds nothing.
Facilities management contractors
A facilities management company holding a maintenance contract across offices, shops or schools subcontracts the trade work and pays in a weekly or fortnightly run. These are the long remittances, often running to dozens or hundreds of lines, each keyed by the facilities company's purchase order or work order number, with your invoice number further along the line when it appears at all. Some runs also net off an early-payment discount or an admin charge.
Insurance repair networks
Home emergency providers, insurers and claims administrators pay repair contractors against a claim or job reference. Network and admin fees are often deducted from the payment, and a policy excess is collected from the householder rather than paid by the insurer, so the amount received is frequently less than the invoice. The guide to reconciling insurance company payments covers part-payments and duplicates from insurers in detail.
Put the work order where your ledger can find it
The fix that saves the most time happens when you invoice, not when the money arrives. Record the payer's reference on every invoice, copied exactly as the payer issues it.
- Xero: put the work order or job number in the invoice's Reference field. Find & Match searches it, so a remittance line that only quotes the work order can still be found in seconds. Add the property address to the line description if the payer lists it.
- QuickBooks Online: invoices have no Reference field, so put the work order in the message to the customer, where it also prints on the invoice the payer receives and makes approval quicker at their end.
- One invoice per work order. Combining two jobs on one invoice means one remittance line can never match it cleanly, and splitting one job across two invoices does the same in reverse.
Then decide who the contact is. Many trades make the agency or facilities company the contact, because it's who pays and who you chase. If your accountant prefers the owner as the debtor, keep the owner as the contact and record the agency's name alongside the work order, so the payment can still be found. Either works, provided it's consistent.
Reconciling a multi-job payment by hand
The job is the same as any one-payment-many-invoices reconciliation, with a translation step in front of it. For each remittance row, search by your invoice number first, then the work order, then the property address, and set aside any row that pays short, nets off a fee or quotes a work order you can't find. Decide those before you open the bank reconciliation screen, and the bank line will reconcile against the full allocation. Where an older invoice never had the work order recorded, search for the row's exact amount, or ask the payer which of your invoice numbers they paid against it.
In Xero, Find & Match can select invoices across several contacts against one bank line, so an agency payment covering twelve owners reconciles in one go. QuickBooks Online is stricter, because a received payment belongs to a single customer. If the owners are your customers, record one payment per owner into Payments to deposit (Undeposited Funds on some accounts). Then group them into one bank deposit that equals the bank line, as covered in the guide to clearing undeposited funds. If the agency is the customer, it's a single payment.
Fees, variations and short payments
A short payment from a trade payer has one of three causes, and each needs different handling:
- A fee deducted by the payer. Network, admin and early-payment charges need their own record in the ledger, usually a credit note or a bill from the payer, before the payment will reconcile. The guide to remittance deductions covers the options, and which to use is a call for you and your accountant.
- The payer approved less than you invoiced. A variation that wasn't signed off, or a quote capped below the final bill. Allocate the amount paid, leave the balance open and query it quoting the work order, rather than crediting it away before the payer has answered.
- Someone else owes the balance. An insurance excess or a tenant-damage portion is owed by the householder or tenant, so it stays open against the invoice until they pay.
Where RemitClear fits
RemitClear works from the remittance itself, whether it arrives as a PDF, a spreadsheet or the body of an email forwarded from your accounts inbox, and matches every line against the open invoices in Xero or QuickBooks Online. Matching handles exact, partial and prefix-based invoice numbers, and where your invoice number isn't on the line, it matches on the references you've recorded on the invoice, such as a work order in Xero's Reference field. On the review screen:
- A line matched on a work order rather than your invoice number carries a badge saying what it matched on, and it waits for a person to confirm rather than posting on its own.
- The payer's name doesn't have to match the contact on the invoice, so an agency paying for a dozen owners matches the same as a direct customer. On Xero one batch can span several contacts, and on QuickBooks Online it posts one payment per customer for you.
- A line quoting an invoice number that's already been paid is marked Already Paid rather than paid twice, and if the allocation and the remittance total disagree, the difference is shown and nothing posts until you've decided what it is.
On QuickBooks Online, matching on a work order reads the message to the customer, so the setup above is what makes it work. The trades remittance matching page shows the workflow end to end, and email remittance capture covers the forwarding inbox.
