Job management for a residential builder

The problem

The company was not short of work. It was short of a reliable way to move a job from enquiry to invoice without three people holding pieces of it in their heads.

We spent the scoping call mapping the actual sequence of a job, then wrote it down as a set of screens. The written scope named every screen and what happened on it, so nothing was decided later by accident.

• A quote builder with saved line items and current rates
• Quote status visible to the office without asking the estimator
• One click from accepted quote to scheduled job
• Crew scheduling that works on a phone in a truck
• Site photos and notes attached to the job, not to a phone
• Timesheets that feed straight into invoicing
• Invoices pushed to the accounting system without retyping

What we built

The centre of the system is the job. A quote becomes a job, the job carries its own schedule, photos, notes and hours, and the invoice is built from what actually happened rather than from memory.

Estimators work from a rate card the owner controls. Changing a price changes it everywhere, and old quotes keep the price they were sent at, so nothing is quietly rewritten after the fact.

On site, the crew sees only today and tomorrow. Adding a photo or a note takes two taps, and the office sees it immediately. Nobody has to be taught a system to use it once a day.

What changed

Quotes now go out the same day the site visit happens, because the estimator is assembling rather than authoring. Follow-ups are prompted automatically, so quotes stop dying quietly in an inbox.

Month-end invoicing takes an afternoon instead of a week, and the owner can see what every job is worth while it is still running rather than after it has finished.