Most pool pros invoice for months before they realize every dollar, repairs, routine service, parts, chemicals, has been landing in one big pile. You can see that you made money. You just can't see where it came from. This guide fixes that in about twenty minutes of setup.
What These Are
Invoice Categories (the bucket):
the revenue buckets your billable items group into, like Repair Income and Cleaning Income. These are internal only and never shown on customer invoices.
Pool Service Types (the work):
describe the kind of work done at a pool, like Platinum Cleaning Service or Commercial Service. The name shows up on invoices as the line-item name.
When you connect the two, every invoiced item sorts itself into the right bucket for reporting. No more lumping everything together and guessing later.
Why It's Worth Using
With Invoice Categories and Pool Service Types in place you can finally answer questions like:
How much did I make in parts sold this month versus routine service?
Which side of my business, cleaning or repair, is growing?
Are my commercial accounts pulling their weight compared to residential?
With QuickBooks Online:
each category maps to its own QBO income account, so revenue posts to the right place automatically. Real, accurate books with no manual sorting. This is what the feature was built for. See more details below.
Even without QuickBooks
you still get a clean revenue breakdown right inside Skimmer with the Sales by Category and Income by Category reports. Valuable on its own, no integration required.
What This Means for QuickBooks Online
The categories double as a map to QBO. Link each invoice category (and each pool service type) to a specific income account, and revenue posts there automatically, no manual journal entries.
Note: A pro can reference their Chart of Accounts in QBO to see what income accounts they have set up.
A few things worth knowing:
Importing products from QBO auto-creates categories. Skimmer reads each product's existing income account and matches it to a category on import.
Changing a mapping re-syncs everything under it. Move a category to a new QBO account, and every item in it gets queued to update in QBO to match.
Recommended setup: map your biggest revenue stream to your default account, then only set up separate mappings for the splits that actually matter, repairs, commercial, retail parts, etc.
Why This Scales Well for Larger Companies
Note: This feature is mainly used by medium to large companies. Before it existed, you had to manually change a product or service's income account directly in QBO after it was mapped, but any re-sync or edit made in Skimmer would overwrite that with the default income account, undoing the change.
As a company grows, this pairing starts doing real work:
Divisions stay separate. Repair, cleaning, commercial, residential, each can be its own category, so you get a P&L split by business line instead of one lump number. Pro's can even break it down further and categorize by chemicals or installed items.
Multiple QBO income accounts, mapped automatically. Larger companies usually don't run everything through one account. They set up separate ones, Product Sales, Repair Income, Service Income, and map each invoice category to its own account so revenue lands in the right place without manual sorting.
Consistent invoicing as the team grows. Pool service types keep line items standardized, so new techs and office staff aren't typing in their own free-text descriptions.
Where to find these settings
Note: For invoice categories to work properly, each item in Skimmer needs an assigned invoice category. This can also be completed with the import, with the exception of Dosages.
Creating Invoice Categories:
Settings / Invoicing / +Add
Products: Assigning income Categories
Settings / Products / Edit
Work Order Types: Assigning income Categories
Settings / Work Order Types / Edit
Dosages: Assigning income Categories
Settings / Readings & Dosages / Edit
Interactive Walkthrough
This guided demo walks you through the setup click by click: creating your categories, assigning them in all four places (products, work order types, dosages), and building your pool service types. Step through it at your own pace.
Demo not loading? Open the interactive walkthrough in a new tab.
Want the full technical reference instead? Including exactly how category changes re-sync to QuickBooks, see Billing: Invoice Categories and Service Types. This guide is the hands-on walkthrough; that one is the complete spec.