What SimpliWork does

SimpliWork tracks the hours your crew works, keeps a record of what was done on each job, and turns both into an invoice.

It is built for restoration and trade contractors — work that happens at somebody else's property, gets billed to a client or an insurer, and has to be defensible months later when a claim is questioned.

Four things everything else sits on

Nearly every screen is some combination of these, so they are worth five minutes now.

Clients

The businesses and people you bill. A client has contacts, and it has the rates you charge them.

Jobs

A piece of work at a property. Elsewhere you might call it a project, a claim or a loss — in SimpliWork it is a project, and it belongs to one client.

Hours, expenses, documents, estimates and invoices all hang off a job. If you find yourself wanting to track something that is not attached to a job, that is usually a sign it should be.

Workers

The people whose hours are being recorded. A worker is not the same as a login:

• A worker is somebody whose hours appear on a job. Your subcontractor has one even if they never open the app, because somebody in the office enters their time.
• A login is somebody who signs in. Your bookkeeper has one and may have no hours at all.

Most people are both. They are separate because the two lists genuinely differ, and because you pay for logins rather than for workers — see Plans and seats.

Time entries

An hour of somebody's day, against a job and a category. Categories are what decide the billing rate, so "Labour" and "Emergency call-out" can bill differently on the same job.

How the money flows

Hours logged  ─┐
               ├─→  Approved  ─→  On an invoice  ─→  Sent  ─→  Paid
Expenses      ─┘

Two things are worth knowing up front:

Approval is a real step. Hours wait to be approved before they can be billed, and nobody can approve their own — see Approving time. If you work alone, you can switch approval off entirely.

Nothing is billed twice. Once an hour is on an invoice it cannot land on another one. This is the single most important thing SimpliWork does that a spreadsheet does not.

What your clients see

Clients do not see any of the above unless you invite them to the portal. When you do, they see their own jobs, the estimates and invoices you sent them, and any notes you marked client-visible.

They never see your costs, your margin, or what you pay anybody. That separation is built into the product rather than being something you have to remember — see The client portal.

What it does not do

Being straight about this saves everyone time:

• It is not payroll. It records hours worked and what they cost you. It does not run a pay run or file anything with a tax authority.
• It does not write estimates from scratch. It imports them from Xactimate, and it turns them into an agreement your client can accept. The estimating itself happens in the tool you already use.
• It is not a CRM. There is no pipeline, no lead scoring, no email campaigns.

Next

Setting up your workspace — the handful of settings worth getting right before you put real work in.