How to track a job before it becomes an invoice

An invoice is a snapshot: here’s what I’m billing, sent on this date. A job is different — it’s everything that went into earning that invoice, and it usually doesn’t all show up on day one. A boiler repair might start with a callout fee, pick up £40 of parts two days later, then an extra hour when the job runs long. Trying to hold all of that in your head until you’re ready to invoice is exactly the kind of thing that gets forgotten.

Job Tracker gives that in-progress work its own place to live: add a line the moment a cost happens — a part, an hour, a callout — and the job’s running total updates itself. By the time you’re ready to bill it, nothing needs reconstructing from memory or a pile of receipts.

A job moves through three states — Draft, Pending payment, Finished — and none of them are something you tick yourself. Draft means the job has no invoice yet. Pending payment means it’s been turned into an invoice that’s been sent but not yet confirmed paid. Finished means that invoice has been paid. The job’s badge just reads whatever its linked invoice is actually doing.

That’s deliberate: a status you set by hand is a status that quietly goes stale the moment you forget to update it. A status derived from the real invoice timeline — sent, viewed, paid — can’t drift out of sync, because there’s nothing to forget. If you’ve read the invoice tracking guide, this is the same idea applied one level up: the job trusts the invoice, the same way the invoice trusts real timestamps instead of a manual toggle.

When a job’s ready to bill, turning it into an invoice carries the lines straight over — descriptions, quantities, rates — into a normal invoice you can still edit, theme, and send exactly like one built from scratch. There’s no re-typing, and no risk of a line quietly not matching what the job actually recorded.

From there it’s the same invoice you already know: sent by email, a read receipt the moment your client opens it, and a “Confirm payment” prompt if they say they’ve paid before you mark it that way yourself. The job just watches that invoice and reflects whatever it says.

Say a client asks for a bathroom tap replacement. You create the job the day you agree to it — it starts empty, in Draft. Two days later you buy the part: add a materials line, £22. On the day of the work, add a labour line: 1.5 hours at £45/hour, £67.50. You also had to make an extra trip for a fitting that didn’t match: a £15 callout line.

Total so far: £104.50, all sitting on the job, nothing invoiced yet. Once the work’s done, you turn the job into an invoice — all three lines come across as-is. You send it; the job flips to Pending payment the moment the invoice does. Your client pays, you confirm it in Billify, and the job flips to Finished — automatically, because its invoice just did.

Job Tracker sits on Pro Business, next to that company’s Invoices tab — jobs and invoices link both ways, so an invoice built from a job shows a “Job” chip back to it, and a job shows the invoice it produced. If a job never turns into anything (you quoted it, it didn’t go ahead), it just stays in Draft — nothing forces it forward until you do.

The point isn’t to replace your invoice book, it’s to give the work that happens before an invoice a proper place to live — so “what did this job actually cost me, and did I bill for all of it” is a question with a real, typed-in answer, not a guess reconstructed from memory the night before you invoice.