Who joins ServiceM8 and Xero for Moreton Bay trade businesses?

Why does the purchase order number decide whether a Moreton Bay invoice gets paid?

Moreton Bay City Council's purchase order terms are blunt. Invoices go in only after the service is complete, they carry the purchase order number and line items, council pays a valid invoice within 14 days of receipt, and council will reject any invoice that does not include a valid PO number. Hospitals, aged care providers and facility managers in the region run accounts payable the same way, so a tech who finishes a job without the PO on the card has done work that cannot yet be billed.

ServiceM8 holds a PO number on the job, but it only reaches Xero's Reference field when the Xero invoice number is set to the ServiceM8 job number (Settings, Preferences, Invoicing, Xero invoice number). Switch that to Xero issued numbers and the Reference field carries the job number instead, and the PO vanishes from the invoice the council clerk reads. FFP's own Xero page lists PO numbers among the things the standard sync does not reliably carry, which is why we check this setting first on every Moreton Bay account.

Which Moreton Bay customers buy on a PO?

More than a trades region, Moreton Bay is a health and care region. At the 2021 Census the largest industry of employment for residents was hospitals at 4.6 per cent, aged care residential services came third at 2.8 per cent against 2.2 per cent across Queensland, and other social assistance services were close behind. Three of Queensland's seven satellite health centres opened inside the city, at Bribie Island, Caboolture and Kallangur, on top of the existing hospitals at Caboolture and Redcliffe. Every one of those buildings has lifts, switchboards, air conditioning, backflow devices and fire systems that a contractor maintains on a work order.

An aged care operator with homes in several suburbs is the classic case. ServiceM8's Client Sites add-on groups the homes under one head office client, sends invoices for work at any site to Xero under the head office name, and produces statements by site. The operator's accounts team sees one supplier, one statement, every PO matched. Without it, each home becomes a separate Xero contact and the statement run at month end is a manual sort.

How do you keep facility work and house work apart in the one account?

The other half of a Moreton Bay diary is houses. Separate houses were 81.1 per cent of occupied private dwellings at the 2021 Census, against 74.8 per cent for Queensland, flats were 4.7 per cent against 12.5, and 37.9 per cent of dwellings were owned with a mortgage against 34.4. The person who rings is the owner, the owner pays, and a required PO field on that job template is a nuisance that stops the tech invoicing from the driveway.

So the job templates split: a facility template with required PO and site contact fields, and a residential template with none, each pointed at the right invoice layout. Across a city of more than 2,045 square kilometres, from Bribie Island to the Samford and Dayboro hinterland, ServiceM8's Xero Tracking Categories add-on then tags each job with an area or a crew and sends it to Xero with the invoice, so revenue reports by region without the bookkeeper editing lines. The categories sync once a day, so changes made in Xero take up to a day to show in ServiceM8.

How does FFP run a Moreton Bay integration job?

We take one facility job and one house job and follow each from the job card to the Xero invoice on a shared screen. The Reference setting, Client Sites and tracking categories are configuration, and most accounts need nothing more. Where the join needs code, such as supplier bills matched back to the job or a PO carried into a custom invoice layout, FFP's published starting point is $2,000 plus GST, quoted as one fixed price before work starts.