What does a plumber lose to admin?
Evenings and money. The enquiry that came in while you were under a sink went to voicemail and booked someone else. The quote is typed at 21:00 from a photo of a scrap of paper. The invoice goes out three days later and gets paid three weeks after that. Xero’s 2025 report on South African late payments found 91% of small businesses affected, with invoices paid an average of 18 days past their due date 1. For a one-van business, 18 days is the difference between buying the geyser stock and waiting.
What does the enquiry cost when it waits?
Harvard Business Review’s audit of 2,241 companies found firms that contacted a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited an hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as those that waited a day; 23% never replied at all 2. A geyser has burst. The homeowner searched “plumber Vanderbijlpark”, found three, and is phoning all three. The one whose website answered “Yes, we can be there by 14:00, here is the call-out fee” has the job.
What does the stack look like?
| Moment | Now | With the tools |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiry at 07:10 while on a job | Voicemail | Chatbot answers, gives the call-out fee, books the slot |
| The quote | Typed tonight | Built from your rate card on the phone, sent from the driveway |
| Quote accepted | Retyped into an invoice | Becomes the invoice with the same numbers, in one tap |
| The invoice | Sent in three days | Sent before you drive off, with a pay-now link |
| Day 8 unpaid | You forget | The reminder sends itself |
| Month end | A shoebox | Statements with 30/60/90 ageing, already done |
What does a SARS-ready invoice need?
The fields the VAT Act asks for and numbers that do not skip. A tax invoice carries your name, address and VAT number, the words “tax invoice”, a sequential number, the date, the customer’s details, the description and the amounts. Gapless numbering matters because a gap looks like a deleted invoice to an auditor. The bookkeeping product locks an issued invoice and fixes a mistake with a credit note, which is what the auditor expects to see, and it prints “tax invoice” only if you are actually registered, because charging VAT when you are not is an offence.
Does it need a computer?
No. The chatbot lives on the website; the invoicing runs from the phone as an installed app; the reminders send themselves. The office is the van.
What about the customer who wants a quote first?
That is the majority, and it is the quote that wins or loses the job. A quote sent from the driveway, while the customer is still deciding, beats a quote typed that night and read the next morning after two competitors have already quoted. The quoting product builds it from your own rate card, so the number is yours, and the customer accepts it online with one tap, at which point it becomes the invoice without anything being retyped.
What does it cost?
The bookkeeping and invoicing product starts at R190 a month with no setup fee; the website chatbot from R299 a month plus R250 setup. Both are month to month, and the chatbot has a free trial of fifty messages over seven days.
Questions people ask
Can the chatbot give a price?
It gives the prices you put on your site: the call-out fee, the hourly rate, the fixed-price jobs. It does not guess a price for a job it has not seen.
Can customers pay from the invoice?
Yes. Every invoice carries a pay-now link through PayFast, and the payment is recorded against the invoice when it lands.
What if I am not VAT registered?
Then the document is an invoice, not a tax invoice, and the product prints it that way. Add your VAT number the day you register and it switches.
Sources
- Xero, “South Africa Late Payments Report” (2025), reported by IOL, January 2025
- Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (audit of 2,241 US companies)
Where we do this
The same build runs for businesses in Centurion, Witbank and Kimberley, and the city pages set out what changes locally — the languages, the trading hours and the sectors that dominate. Everything is deployed and supported remotely from Vanderbijlpark.