Groundwork · a Pinehurst product
Harker Plumbing & Heating Ltd
Project Brief · 14 May 2026
Where that comes from
Finished jobs never invoiced: £300 to £1,400 a month (the big one). Dave checked March and found three, worth £680.
Dave's evenings on paperwork: £560 to £1,100 a month. We only count the one to two hours a week that push out paying work, at his £65 rate. This is an assumption and it is marked as one.
Landlord contracts lost to missed certificate reminders: about £350 a month. Two were lost last year, worth £4,200 a year between them. Dave's own figure.
Overdraft fees while finished work sits unbilled: £40 to £60 a month, from Dave's bank statements.
The headline range is these four lines added up and rounded to the nearest £50.
A word on how much to trust these numbers. The £680 of unbilled March work, the two lost landlord contracts and the overdraft fees are Dave's own figures. The value of Dave's evenings and the monthly run of unbilled jobs are estimates, and they are marked. Even if you strike out every estimate and keep only what Dave has seen with his own eyes, the leak is still real money every month.
The situation
The real cause is this. A job has one place it starts, the diary, but no one place it lives. Each job's details are retyped up to four times, and nothing links the finished job to an invoice, so completed work can vanish without ever being billed. Fix that and the symptom goes with it.
Left as it is, this keeps costing every month, in money and in Dave's evenings. This brief is the free first step. It sets out what is wrong, what it is costing, and the exact road to fix it for good, without buying the wrong thing or breaking the business on the way.
What good looks like
In your words: "I'm doing quotes at nine at night on the kitchen table and I still couldn't tell you which jobs we never billed."
Every invoice out within two working days of finishing the job.
No finished job left unbilled. The monthly check finds zero.
Dave's paperwork down from 8 to 10 hours a week to under 3.
Every landlord certificate renewal flagged six weeks ahead, none missed.
What is in, and what is out
In this project
Taking bookings
Scheduling the engineers
Job sheets
Quoting
Invoicing
Certificate renewal reminders
The customer list
Out of this project, for now
Accounts. Xero stays and Jan keeps running it
Payroll
Vehicle tracking
Taking on more staff
Fencing this off is how we stop the job quietly growing.
Your project, mapped out
Here is the whole road ahead, built for a trades firm like Harker Plumbing & Heating Ltd. Each step is a short, plain conversation; each one hands you a professional document you can actually use. You have already done the first step, for free.
Stage 1. The Problem. Done, for free. We pin down what is wrong and what it is costing you. You get this Project Brief.
Stage 2. Your Business Today. We map how a real job flows from first call to getting paid, and find where the money leaks. You get a Current State Snapshot.
Stage 3. The People. We work out who is involved, who decides, and who might dig their heels in. You get a People and Engagement Plan.
Stage 4. What You Need. We turn all of it into a proper needs list, prioritised, that suppliers have to answer to. You get a Requirements Pack, your shield against sales patter.
Stage 5. Your Options. We research real products against your needs and score them fairly, with doing nothing costed alongside. You get an Options Comparison and a sheet of Questions for Vendors.
Stage 6. The Numbers. We work out whether it actually pays for itself, and what the risks are. You get a Business Case your bank or accountant will take seriously.
Stage 7. The Plan. We plan the rollout so it does not break the business while you switch over. You get a Rollout Plan and a Go-Live Checklist.
Stage 8. Your Team. We get your people on side, with a script for telling them and a plan for training. You get a Team Pack.
Stage 9. Did It Work. Sixty and ninety days on, we check the result against what the problem was costing you. You get a Results Review.
What you walk away with
For £299, a one-off payment for this project, you get every step above and the full set of thirteen documents, one for each stage plus a running risk and assumptions log. This is the analysis and paperwork a consultant would charge £3,000 to £10,000 for, yours to keep and reuse forever.
They come bundled and ready to send:
Vendor Pack: your needs list and the questions to ask, so suppliers pitch to you, not the other way round.
Finance Pack: the business case, the options comparison and the risk log, for the bank, the accountant or a co-owner.
Team Pack: the announcement, the training plan and honest answers to the objections you will hear.
One download brings the lot, refreshed whenever anything changes.
How Groundwork works
Straight answers, not sales patter. Doing nothing is always costed as a real option, and if the numbers say do not buy, we say so. Every assumption is marked as an assumption. Where you do not have a number yet, we say so rather than invent one. An AI does the analysis; check the documents before you act on them.
What happens next
The next step, Your Business Today, is where this starts paying for itself. We map how one real job flows from the first phone call to the money landing, and nearly every time it turns up two or three places money is quietly leaking that the owner had stopped noticing.
These figures are based on what you told us; check anything big with your accountant.