The invoice writes itself the moment the job's done

It's a new month. Your bookkeeper wants the invoices.

You and your office manager block out two days. You pull the job cards off the spike on the wall, you sort them by client, you open Xero, you start typing.

Three invoices come out wrong. One job card gets missed entirely. One customer gets billed twice because the previous month's job card was clipped behind it.

This is your finance process. It's been your finance process since you started. It eats two days a month of your office manager's time and one phone call's worth of trust with the customer who got double-billed.

The job done IS the invoice

Think about the moment the work is finished.

The technician closes the jobcard on his phone. The site is clean. The customer signs. The materials used are logged. The hours are logged. Every fact you need to issue an invoice exists, right now, on a server.

The next thing that should happen is the invoice goes out. The bookkeeper marks it AUTHORISED. The customer pays.

That's not how it works for most service businesses. The job finishes on the 14th. The invoice gets typed on the 28th. The customer gets it on the 30th. He pays on the 30th of the next month if you're lucky.

You've added six weeks of cash flow lag to a job that was done six weeks ago.

The fix isn't a better spreadsheet. The fix is to stop typing the invoice twice.

What Crooh does with Xero

Crooh has the full sales document pipeline built in: quotes, proformas, invoices. Per-organisation numbering with your prefix (QU, INV, whatever you've set). Line items, tax, totals.

You connect Xero once. Settings, Xero tab, click Connect. OAuth runs, you log in to Xero, you authorise Crooh, you're back. Five minutes.

From that point, two-way sync runs in both directions.

Clients in Crooh sync to Xero contacts. The Xero contact ID gets stamped on each client. Edit the client's email in Crooh, it updates in Xero. Edit it in Xero, it updates in Crooh on the next webhook tick.

Invoices in Crooh sync as Xero invoices. The Crooh invoice number becomes the Xero invoice reference. Line items, amounts, tax codes, all match. The Xero invoice starts as DRAFT.

Here's the part that matters.

The moment a jobcard linked to a Crooh invoice is marked complete, Crooh tells Xero to flip the invoice to AUTHORISED.

The bookkeeper sees authorised invoices appearing in Xero as jobs finish. She doesn't type them. She doesn't import them. She reviews them.

Why AUTHORISED on completion is the right default

In Xero, an invoice has three states that matter to your cash flow: DRAFT, AUTHORISED, PAID.

DRAFT means the invoice exists but isn't billable. AUTHORISED means it's been approved and the customer can pay it. PAID means money landed.

The standard pattern in most service businesses is: technician finishes the job, bookkeeper finds out about it days later, bookkeeper raises the invoice in Xero, bookkeeper switches it from DRAFT to AUTHORISED. The work is in the gap between "job finished" and "bookkeeper finds out."

Crooh deletes the gap. Jobcard complete is the same event as invoice authorised. Your bookkeeper's job becomes review and exception handling, not data entry.

If you want a hold step, the default is configurable: you can leave invoices in DRAFT and have her authorise them manually. Most of our customers move to auto AUTHORISED within a month.

What about Xero changes Crooh doesn't see?

Webhook support. When Xero updates an invoice on its side (mostly payment status), Xero pings Crooh. Crooh updates the invoice record. The jobcard then knows it's paid.

This matters when a customer pays late. The jobcard's status carries the truth: completed, invoiced, AUTHORISED, paid. You can run a report on outstanding-but-completed jobs in seconds.

Connect it on a Sunday afternoon

If you're already in Xero, the Crooh side is the new step. Set it up on a Sunday afternoon when no one's invoicing.

The 1rst of this month will be the last 1rst you spend catching up on old jobcards.