NZPM (New Zealand Plumbers' Merchants) has put together a group of cloud apps to help its plumbers with a great solution for jobs, accounting, pricing and stock management. The action was one of the first of its kind in Australia and New Zealand. Promoted as “the best cloud solutions ever assembled for the trades”, the bundle consisted of job scheduling and management tool GeoOp, cloud accounting software Xero and online inventory management Unleashed. In order to supply plumbers with real-time pricing when designating parts for jobs, Unleashed spent two months working on the integration with the inventory database of Plumbing World, NZPM’s retail outlet. Plumbers would use GeoOp to distribute jobs, record parts required and used as well as send invoices, taking full advantage of having the Plumbing World price list right within GeoOp, which working as the main interface, can also be accessed on smartphones and tablets. Through the use of live pricing on every job, GeoOp could calculate job costing and profit in real-time. “We update Unleashed with the actual materials used so the plumber on the road doesn’t know anything about the inventory program,” said Nick Bartlett, GeoOp’s director of operations. Unleashed planned to expand such integrations with other trades suppliers. “The vision is that no-one in a trade organisation would have to touch a price list again. Unleashed would hold it centrally and it would provide the correct one to each account,” Bartlett said. “For the first time ever, the NZPM price file is live and instantly available through Unleashed & GeoOp. Having real time integration with Unleashed provides you with the confidence of knowing your precise margins for every component of every job!” the bundle brochure said. The bundle start price was from NZ$139 +gst per month and offered training and set-up for a fixed NZ$250 +gst fee which is carried out by Training and Beyond, a cloud software training company run by Xero bookkeeper Melanie Morris, founder of New Zealand Bookkeepers Association.
