What does a typical document workflow look like in an installation company?
A technician drives to a client, completes the work and records hours, materials and findings on a work order. That might be a paper form, a photo of a handwritten sheet, or an input field in an app that does not connect to the ERP. At the end of the day, everything lands with the back office: via WhatsApp, email or a pile on the desk. Inspection reports and certificates, such as electrical inspection records or gas-tightness test protocols, are emailed separately or printed and stored in a project folder. The back office enters hours and material usage by hand, links them to the correct project and generates the invoice. Every step is a moment where information gets lost, delayed or entered twice.
Where do things specifically break down with work orders and reports?
The three most common bottlenecks are additional work that does not make it onto the order, missing client signatures and inspection results that remain disconnected from the project administration. Additional work is a recurring problem: a technician solves an extra issue on site, jots it down hastily or forgets it entirely. What is not on the work order does not get invoiced. Client signatures are often required in the installation industry for handover or inspection, but if the technician leaves without one, disputes follow. And inspection reports, NEN 1010 inspections, legionella protocols, refrigerant logs, get archived but are rarely linked automatically to the relevant object or project in the system. That means searching through files the moment a client calls back or a re-assessment is needed.
Which documents are best suited for automation?
Not every document lends itself equally well to automation. Work orders with a consistent structure, even if the format varies by technician or client, are strong candidates: dottle reads the document, extracts hours, material codes and client details, and prepares them for approval in the ERP or accounting package. A staff member reviews and signs off before anything enters the system. Inspection reports with standardised fields, such as NEN inspection forms or refrigeration system logs, are also straightforward to read. Purchase invoices from materials suppliers tend to be high in volume and relatively uniform in the installation industry: significant manual retyping that disappears. Loose emails with incomplete information, or work orders that contain only free-text descriptions without fixed fields, are harder to process and deliver less value.
When does automating document workflows make sense, and when does it not?
Automation pays off when the volume is large enough. If an installation company processes dozens of work orders per week and the back office consistently spends hours on them, the business case is straightforward. It also makes sense when the process is reasonably stable: the work order has a recognisable structure, project codes are known in the system and the approval flow is in place. Automation does not pay off when the source data is structurally poor: work orders that are half-filled in, photos that are illegible, or project codes written differently every time. In that case, the problem is not the processing but the registration at the front end. And it does not make sense when volume is low and the back office handles the retyping without noticeable delays. An honest conversation about that threshold is worth more than building a system that barely gets used.
How does automation connect to the systems installation companies already use?
Many installation companies work with ERP packages such as AFAS Profit, Exact or Unit4, sometimes supplemented by a specialist planning or service module. dottle connects to those systems and delivers structured data directly where the work is tracked. That means no more manual retyping of work order data into AFAS, no duplicate entry of materials from purchase invoices and no separate folder of inspection reports that cannot be searched. The technician does not need to change anything: they submit the document by email, upload or scan. Approval stays with the back office: they see what dottle has extracted, check it and confirm. The person stays in control, without having to retype everything.