Getting Started with BlitzBooks: The Full Walkthrough

Ten minutes of setup, then every quote takes about a minute. This walks through the whole thing in the order you will actually use it: get your details in, send a quote, track the job, get paid.

1. Set up your business once

Everything you put in Settings → Branding gets printed on every quote and invoice you ever send, so it is worth five minutes.

• Logo and business name. Upload a logo if you have one. If you do not, your business name is printed instead and it still looks smart.
• Brand colour. One colour, used across your documents. Pick the one off your bakkie.
• Banking details. These print on every document with your reference, which is the single biggest thing you can do to get paid faster.
• VAT number, if you are registered. Leave it blank if you are not and the VAT line disappears entirely. (Not sure? See Do I need to register for VAT?)
• Default terms. Written once, attached to every quote.

2. Choose how your documents look

In Settings → Branding → Document Design you pick the template your quotes, invoices and pro formas print with. There are four, and they are genuinely different layouts rather than the same page in four colours:

• Bold — a full-width colour banner across the top. The original BlitzBooks look.
• Clean — white header, one thin line in your brand colour, lots of space. Modern and quiet.
• Classic — a centred serif letterhead with everything boxed. Formal, for clients who expect formal.
• Compact — tight rows that fit roughly twice as many lines on a page. Best if you quote long materials lists.

Underneath the template you can set the typeface, the logo size and position, whether the header is a colour banner or plain, how the table rows look, and whether to show your tagline, banking block and terms.

There is a live preview right there on the settings screen. It renders a real quote through the real engine, so what you see is exactly what prints, not an artist's impression.

3. Build and send a quote

Tap Quotes → New. Add the client, then your lines.

Two things worth knowing about lines:

• A line can be more than one line. The description box grows as you type, so you can write a whole scope under one price. Most trades quote a job in total rather than itemising every screw, and this is how you do that:

Rewire of kitchen and scullery
· Strip existing wiring back to the DB
· New 2.5mm twin and earth throughout
· 4 new double plug points, 2 isolators
· Make good and test                      R 8 400,00

• Leave the quantity blank for a lump-sum line and just put the amount in. The Qty and Unit Price columns disappear from the printed page when nothing uses them.

Add a section heading to group work, set your deposit percentage, and the payment schedule builds itself. Then Share: preview it, print it, save it as a PDF, or send it straight to the client's WhatsApp.

4. Track the job (optional)

If you want to record what actually happened on site, switch on Settings → Branding → Jobs & Scheduling. If you do not, skip this section entirely, nothing about your app changes.

With it on, an accepted quote gets a Convert to Job button next to Convert to Invoice. A job is where you record:

• The site address, which is often not the billing address. A landlord bills to an office while the work happens at a flat, and your crew needs the flat.
• Time on and time off site, with the hours worked out for you. It handles jobs that run past midnight.
• What was actually used, as opposed to what you quoted. This is the important one. If you quoted 18m of cable and used 24m, the job records 24m, and the invoice follows what you used.
• Who was on site.
• The customer's signature, drawn on your phone, dated, and printed on the job card.

When the job is done, Create Invoice builds the invoice from what was actually used. The gap between what you quoted and what you used is the only honest measure of whether a job made you money.

5. Plan your week

From Jobs → Schedule you get a week at a time, with a bar showing how full each day is, and everything still waiting for a date underneath.

Set two things on each job and the planning does itself:

• How long it takes — full day, three-quarter day, half day, or a short one.
• Where it is — search the address, tap I'm here while standing on site, or just tap the map. Dragging the pin works too.

Then hit Auto-plan. It fills each day to a full day and puts jobs that are near each other on the same day, because two half-days forty kilometres apart costs you the drive and the day rate.

It gives you a draft. Nothing is booked until you press Confirm, and you can move anything you disagree with. It is deliberately simple arithmetic rather than a black box, so you can always see why a day looks the way it does.

6. Get paid

An accepted quote becomes an invoice in one tap, carrying everything across. Record payments as they come in and the invoice moves itself between outstanding, partly paid and paid. Overdue ones go red on your dashboard without you doing anything.

For a client with a few invoices running, send a statement from their client page: every invoice, every payment, and the balance. It is the polite way to chase. (More in How to chase a late-paying customer.)

7. The dashboard is your shortcut

The home screen is not just numbers, every tile is a link. Revenue this month, outstanding, overdue, pro formas, and if you use jobs, unbilled work (jobs you have finished and not invoiced, which is money sitting on the table) and not booked. Tap any of them to go straight to the filtered list.

8. Reports, VAT and backups

Under More → Reports you get revenue, outstanding, aged debtors, quote performance and a VAT201 summary that adds up output VAT from your invoices and input VAT from your logged expenses. (See VAT for tradesmen.)

Settings → Data & Backup exports everything to a single file. Worth doing once a month.

Lost? Replay the tour

Settings → Help & Support → Replay product tour walks you through the app screen by screen, pointing at each button before it takes you there. Same place has our email and phone number, and we do answer.