Your dig date is owned by three people who don’t work for you — and the shortest clock is the one you start last.
Architectural review. The permit. The locate ticket. All three have to be open on the same morning, and the locate is the short one, because you cannot call it until an install date exists and the install date does not exist until the other two clear.
So when review runs late or a week of rain pushes the crew, the dig date walks quietly off the end of a ticket called perfectly on time. Your build watches those two dates and re-calls before the marks die.
The ticket was called on time for a July dig. Then the schedule slipped three weeks. Nothing cancelled it, nothing flagged it, and the crew is currently booked to dig on marks that stopped counting eleven days ago.
Every one of these has to be open on the day the crew arrives. None of them belongs to you.
This is the structural fact that makes fencing unlike painting, and it is the thing a renamed home-services template cannot express: between sold and dug sit three separate approvals, running on three separate clocks, held by three parties who do not work for you and do not tell each other anything.
Architectural review commonly takes ~2–6 weeks and is often heard only at a monthly board meeting. The municipal permit is additional to it, not an alternative. And the locate ticket needs roughly two full working days’ notice, then covers the dig for a fixed window that ends.
- Architectural review2–6 weeks · a monthly meeting
- Municipal permitAdditional to review, not instead of it
- The locate ticketShortest clock · started last
Illustrative example. The week numbers are invented; the shape and the ordering are not. The locate ticket is the last gate you can start, because you cannot call it before an install date exists — so it is the gate a slipping schedule actually breaks. How long a ticket stays valid is set by your own locate center and varies by state. Your build stores that number as a setting on your account and computes every expiry from it. It is never a figure welded into a workflow, and this page will not tell you what yours is.
What your build is doing between the deposit and the first post hole.
Most contractor software is built for the half of the job that happens before the sale. In this trade the dangerous half is entirely after it — and it is worked off dates, signatures and third-party responses rather than off anybody remembering.
Half of these fire because one date moved past another date. That is not a thing a person notices on a busy Monday in June.
- 01 Deposit, then material, then a dateIn that order, on purpose Taking a deposit before ordering material is the published trade norm at roughly ~30–50%, and material ordering is the point of no return on a cancellation. So the build treats it as a state, not a note: the deposit invoice fires from your deposit percentage against the quoted amount, and the job cannot reach Material Ordered until it is paid.
- 02 Where the property line came fromRecorded as a source, not a guess A recorded survey, a plat map, found pins, the old fence line, or the customer pointing at a hedge. Those are not the same answer and the build does not treat them as one. Anything weaker than found pins flags the job and requires a signed layout acknowledgement before a dig date can be set. The software never decides where your line is — it records what you relied on.
- 03 Submitted, and now waitingA heartbeat, not a drip Once a job is sold and waiting, a marketing send is worse than silence. The waiting cadence names which third party is holding the job and what the next date is, because the customer’s anger is about not knowing. And whether you pull the permit or the homeowner does is a setting — published practice runs both ways and the build does not pick for you.
- 04 The approval that expires while you are backloggedA silent re-submission Architectural approvals commonly run out after roughly ~60–90 days. In a ~6–8 week peak-season backlog that clock can end before your crew ever rolls, and nobody tells you — the customer finds out when a neighbor complains. The expiry date is a watched field, so the warning arrives while re-submitting is still routine.
- 05 Install date set, so call the ticketRoughly two full working days Notice before excavation is legally required, with roughly two full working days’ notice — and a working day excludes weekends and holidays, which is why counting it by hand goes wrong. The ticket number, the call date and the computed expiry all land on the job, and the crew is not released until every member utility has responded.
- 06 The install date movesThe one that actually happens This is the workflow this whole build exists to prove. Two triggers: the expiry is approaching, or the dig date has been moved to a day after it. Either way the re-call task opens before the marks die rather than after. Review slips, permits slip, weather slips, June slips — and a ticket called perfectly on time quietly stops covering the dig.
- 07 The lines nobody markedThe most common real strike A locate ticket marks member-owned public utilities. Irrigation, invisible dog fence, pool wiring, low-voltage lighting, shed and lamp-post feeds, well and septic are past the meter and are not marked by it. The build chases the homeowner’s private-line acknowledgement to signed, and an unsigned one blocks the dig the same way an unsigned layout acknowledgement does.
- 08 Posts set, then nobody touches themThe gap is engineering Concrete needs roughly ~24–48 hours before anything loads those posts, or the fence leans. So the build is two calendar events with an unbookable hold between them, and the second one cannot be booked until the hold clears. The customer message during the gap says plainly that it is cure time, because two silent days beside a half-built fence reads as abandonment.
Four of those eight fire because a date moved, not because somebody looked
An approval that runs out during a backlog. A locate ticket that expires. A dig date that slides past that expiry. A cure hold that has to finish before a second crew day can be booked. None of them produces a form fill, a stage change or an inbound message, which is exactly why a snapshot assembled out of appointment reminders cannot be retrofitted into this. We looked at what the strongest fencing packages on the market publish: named stages, a stalled-estimate sequence, review requests, missed-call capture. Not one of them publishes anything that watches a third-party expiry date.
- An approval expiring behind your own backlog
- A locate ticket running out
- A dig date moved past that ticket
- A cure hold that has to clear before day two
She paid you in April. She has not heard from anyone since, and she has drawn her own conclusion.
This is fencing’s signature failure and it is reputational, not competitive. You did not lose her to a cheaper bid. You lost her in the silence between a deposit and a crew, and the review she writes will not mention the review board at all.
The arithmetic is the part owners underestimate, because the two waits are additive rather than concurrent: approvals happen before the backlog starts counting, not inside it.
~4–6 weeks in spring from first contact to start. This is the number that gets said out loud in the driveway, and it is honest at the time.
Additive, not concurrent — and on a monthly board cycle a submission that misses the agenda by two days waits for the next meeting. She heard one number in April.
The status message names the third party, or it is worthless
“Still waiting on approvals” is what she has already assumed. What changes the conversation is naming who is holding the job and what date comes next: submitted on the 12th, the board meets on the 3rd, we call the locate the week the permit clears. Same wait, entirely different customer, and it costs you nothing because the build already holds those dates.
The board can approve a fence you did not quote
Architectural committees dictate height, style, color and picket spacing — and that decision arrives after the sale, which is what makes it dangerous. A spec change is a scope change, so it fires a re-quote rather than being quietly absorbed by whoever is standing closest to the job when it lands.
Rock at post depth is a change order, and the wording is written before the dig
Caliche, hardpan or ledge at post depth turns a priced job into a conversation the customer can refuse. Operators who survive it define the exclusion by equipment rather than by geology — material that cannot be removed by a named machine using conventional methods is not included. The soil condition is captured at measure, so the job that is likely to hit it is flagged before anybody quotes it.
A shared-line job has two payers and one fence
Where a neighbor is splitting the cost, that is not a friendly note on the file — it is a second payer with their own balance. Shared-fence statutes exist and at least one state presumes equal responsibility between adjoining owners, with a written-notice procedure attached. Whether yours does is a question for your own counsel. What the build does is make the second payer a real record with a real balance, because billing a cost-share job as one payer is a collections problem later.
Your quote has a shelf life, and it is shorter than your software thinks.
The generic contractor default is thirty days. Published guidance for lumber-dependent contractors runs ~14–21 days, and specifically ~7–14 days on wood-heavy fence work — because suppliers themselves hold a quoted price for only about ~15–30 days in a volatile market.
The mechanism is not rhetorical. Framing lumber ran above ~$1,500 per thousand board feet at the pandemic peak and about ~$420 by mid-2025. A quote written on the way up eats the job it wins, and honoring a stale one out of politeness is the most expensive courtesy in this trade.
- Day 0
The quote leaves from the driveway, with the drawing attached
The layout is the proposal in this trade — the whole estimating stack exists to collapse measure and quote into one visit. It carries the expiry date, the deposit, and the honest lead time, because all three are easier to say now than to explain in July.
- Day 1
One text about the layout, not about the price
Fence buyers ask about gate placement, style and what the neighbor will see. Those are the questions that close. A discount offered on day one answers a question nobody asked.
- Day 3
A call task on the estimator who stood in the yard
Not a broadcast. The person who drew the layout is the only one who can answer why the run steps where it steps.
- Day 7
The expiry warning — and it works because it is true
Material pricing on this quote holds until a specific date, and that date is on the record rather than in somebody’s memory. This is the only urgency in the trade that is not manufactured.
- Days 10–14
Close it out, or re-price it
Past the window it is a re-quote, not a follow-up. The build will not silently sell last quarter’s lumber at last quarter’s number.
Five things force a re-quote, and one of them arrives after you have already won
Each of these re-opens the price rather than being absorbed: the quote passing its validity date; the architectural committee approving a different specification than the one quoted; a survey or a found pin changing the run length, since footage is the price; rock or hardpan found at layout or at dig; and an insurance adjuster’s scope coming in below your written estimate — where your own written scope is the instrument you negotiate with.
- Past its validity date
- A different spec approved
- Footage changed by the line
- Rock at post depth
- Adjuster scope below estimate
A 214-foot cedar privacy fence and a bonded school perimeter are not the same business.
One is measured, quoted and built in weeks against a homeowner and three approvals. The other runs for months against an invitation to bid, a takeoff, a submitted number, an award, a contract and a retainage release. Same word on the truck. Different company, different vocabulary, different payer.
And the middle board exists because everything on it happens after the money changed hands, which is the part a single sales pipeline has nowhere to put. These are the actual stage names on the actual boards, in the order they appear.
Fencing Sales
Days to weeks · a three-bid commodity decision- New Lead
- Qualified (footage / material / timeline)
- Measure Appointment Scheduled
- Measured
- Quoted
- Follow-Up
- Sold — Deposit Taken
- Lost
Fencing Production
Weeks to months · mostly other people’s clocks- Permit / HOA Submitted
- Approvals Cleared
- 811 Ticket Called
- Locate Cleared / Positive Response
- Material Ordered
- Scheduled
- Posts Set
- Concrete Cure Hold
- Rails & Pickets / Gates Hung
- Final Walkthrough
- Final Payment
- Warranty Registered
Commercial / Bid Work
Months · a different payer and a different vocabulary- Bid Invitation Received
- Plan Takeoff
- Site Visit
- Bid Submitted
- Awarded
- Contract Signed
- In Production
- Retainage Release
- Warranty Period
Why Concrete Cure Hold is a stage and not a note
Because a stage is a thing the board refuses to move past, and a note is a thing a dispatcher scrolls by at 6am. Posts set on Tuesday cannot have rails hung on Tuesday, and the failure mode is not a scheduling annoyance — it is a fence that leans, a warranty callback, and a customer who tells the story with photographs. The hold is deliberately not a bookable calendar object, because a bookable hold is a hold somebody books over.
Four calendars, and the install is two of them
Modeling the build as one “install day” is wrong on the majority of wood and vinyl jobs. It ships as two events with an unbookable gap between them, which is also the only honest way to tell the customer why nobody was there on Wednesday.
A technical site survey, not a sales call — soil, slope, drainage, access and the existing structures all change method and material. Footage, gate count, terrain and the property-line source are captured here.
Day one of two. The confirmation carries access width, the dog, the gate codes and the marked lines, because an estimator who cannot get in is a truck roll for nothing.
Day two, and it cannot be booked until the cure hold clears. Same job, same crew, a mandatory gap in between.
One person, not a crew. Proactive, at 60 days, aimed squarely at the thing that actually comes back.
Your repeat business is not a membership. It is a list of dates.
Nobody buys a fence twice. What they do is call you about the gate, ask when they can stain it, and mention you to the neighbor whose fence is the same age as the one you just replaced. Every one of those is a date you can compute at completion — and a register worked off due dates is a completely different object from a drip campaign.
Seven clocks, all of them started by a job you already finished
Bars show roughly where each one lands on a three-year view from completion. All of the intervals are settings on your account.
- Gate adjustment checkThe dominant warranty eventday 60
- Stain eligibility, wood onlyThe date is set by chemistryday 90
- Frost-heave callback waveBatched, not per-contactnext spring
- Workmanship warranty expiryOne year is the trade standard12 months
- Off-season book-now windowCapacity exists and the work is discretionaryQ4 / Q1
- Temporary fence rentalA rental book, not a jobmonthly
- Material warranty expiryVaries by an order of magnitude1 yr – lifetime
Illustrative placement. The gate check at 60 days and the stain window at 90 days are this build’s configured defaults, not published practice — the underlying facts they are pinned to are that gate sag is the dominant warranty event and that pressure-treated wood needs roughly ~3–6 months to dry before it takes stain. The one-year workmanship term and the wide material spread are published warranty conventions in the trade.
Two warranty dates, because there are two warranties
Workmanship runs about a year and published warranties name gates specifically, including sag. Material is a different date entirely: one published schedule runs from roughly a year on chain link and untreated wood, to about three years on cedar, to lifetime and transferable on aluminum and vinyl. A build that carries one date loses the other — and the material date is the one they call you about in year four. Several manufacturer warranties also require product registration to take effect, which is a completion-time task nobody does unless it is on a checklist.
The gate is the moving part, so the gate is the callback
Hinges wear, bend or pull loose. Heavy gates accelerate it. Gate posts lean, shift or rot, and then the gate sags even with good hardware. A proactive check at day 60 catches settle-in sag while it is still a five-minute hinge turn inside your labor warranty rather than an emergency in month eleven — and it puts a person back on the property at exactly the moment the stain conversation becomes possible. When a defect is found, the callback flag suppresses the review request and every upsell until it is closed.
The stain campaign is material-gated, and that is the whole point
New pressure-treated wood has to dry before it takes stain — the consensus wait is ~3–6 months, and the field test operators quote is that if sprinkled water beads, it is still too wet. So the eligibility date is computed from the install date and the campaign is suppressed entirely for vinyl, aluminum and chain link. Without that rule, a third of your customer base is offered a stain on a vinyl fence, which is the single clearest tell that a template was renamed rather than built.
The cheapest lead you will ever get is standing on the other side of it
Every install is a large, new, visible object on a boundary shared with one to three neighbors — whose own fence is usually the same age as the one you just replaced, and who have watched a crew work for two days. The ask is geographically deterministic: the adjacent parcels and the run of the street. And where a cost-share conversation already happened, the neighbor is already a named contact with a known reason to buy. The reward wording is a setting; it ships reading “$100 for you, $100 off for them — paid when their job books.”
Winter is the collapse, which is exactly why it is the campaign
Companies booked ~2–3 weeks out in summer can often schedule within days in Q4, and published Q4 pricing runs roughly ~15–25% below peak. That makes Q4 and Q1 the right window for the book-now offer, the maintenance push and the commercial bid push — capacity exists and the work is discretionary. Segmented off install history and material, and every send respects your do-not-contact and stop flags.
The review request waits for the walkthrough, not the last picket
It fires after sign-off and after final payment, two hours later, and never while a gate callback, a line dispute or an unsettled insurance claim is open. The final walkthrough is done by the person who sold the layout rather than the crew, because they are the only one who knows what was promised — and it produces the photo set, which is simultaneously your warranty baseline and the only referral asset a fence buyer actually responds to.
The rails are structural, because a rail that lives inside one workflow gets forgotten by the fortieth.
Fencing is a trade where the software can do real damage by being helpful. These four ship switched on, and they are constraints on what the build is capable of saying — not reminders somebody has to read.
No message, task or status in this build releases a crew before a positive response from every member utility is on the record, and no workflow states a ticket lifetime as a number. Notice before excavation is legally required with roughly two full working days’ notice, marks expire, and inside the tolerance zone the instruction is hand tools only within roughly ~18–24 inches of a marked line. How long your ticket lasts, and what your penalties are, are your own locate center’s rules — the build stores your number and computes from it. It never supplies one.
A misplaced fence comes down at somebody’s cost, so the build records what you relied on, grades how strong that is, asks for a survey where it is weak, and collects a signed layout acknowledgement before a dig date exists. It does not adjudicate a boundary, generate boundary language, or tell a homeowner their line is fine. That is our own conservative configuration choice, not legal advice, and questions about a specific line belong with a surveyor and your own counsel.
Automated vehicular gates are held to published industry safety standards — the trade bodies’ guidance calls for at least two monitored entrapment-protection devices per entrapment zone per direction of travel, the manufacturer’s safety checklist run and signed by installer and customer, and the safety measures photographed and filed. That file is the contractor’s record if an entrapment claim ever arrives. We ship the gate enabled because it costs nothing operationally. We describe those standards as industry standards, because whether any of them is codified where you work is a question for your jurisdiction, not for us.
Do-not-contact, stop-nurture, a bad-fit flag, an open gate callback, an open line dispute, and an unsettled insurance claim — honored in one place that every message has to clear, including the register and the seasonal sends. Never ask a customer to rate you while you still owe them something, and never market to someone whose job is sitting behind a board meeting.
The follow-up you keep meaning to build, plus the four dates you cannot afford to miss.
Written for this trade specifically, not renamed from a home-services template. Every interval below is a setting on your account rather than a number welded into a workflow.
Three intakes, because the first sentence differs
A web or maps lead, a referral or neighbor by name, and a repair or storm-damage call. The referral lane names the referrer and suppresses the generic offer. The repair lane tightens the response window and routes straight to a measure slot — it skips review and permit, but it does not skip the locate if a new hole is dug.
Missed-call text-back
Fires on a missed inbound and swaps to your after-hours wording outside office hours. In June, when the office cannot answer the phone, a missed call is a competitor’s booked measure.
The seven-day new-lead sequence for anyone who did not book
Aimed at one outcome only: a measure appointment on the calendar. It never quotes a per-foot number, because footage, terrain, slope and gate count are all unknown until somebody stands in the yard, and a blind number anchors the customer against the estimator who has to correct it.
Measure confirmation that makes the visit productive
Three things in the reminder: be there, secure the dog, and know where your property line comes from. A no-show burns a truck roll into a back yard nobody can assess without the customer — gate codes, dogs, and above all where they believe the line runs.
The five-touch quote sequence and its expiry warning
Day zero from the driveway with the drawing, day one on the layout, day three a call task on the estimator, day seven the expiry warning, close-out at day ten to fourteen. Past that it is a re-quote.
Re-quote, rather than quietly honoring a stale price
Fires on the five triggers rather than leaving it to whoever is nearest the job: past validity, an approved spec change, a footage change, rock at depth, or an adjuster scope below your estimate.
The deposit and material-order gate
Deposit invoice computed from your percentage against the quoted amount, then material ordering, then a date — in that order, because material is the point of no return on a cancellation and a refund conversation turns on which side of it you are.
The waiting-state heartbeat
For sold jobs stuck behind review or permit. It names the third party holding the job and the next real date, and it suppresses every marketing send at that contact while it runs.
The approval expiry watch
Because an approval that runs out behind your own summer backlog is a silent re-submission requirement, and the customer usually finds out first.
The property-line risk gate
Grades the source, flags the weak ones, and holds the job out of a dig date until the layout acknowledgement is signed. Where a neighbor is cost-sharing, it opens the second payer as a real record with a real balance.
The locate call, and then the expiry watch
Ticket number, call date and computed expiry on the job; the crew held until every member utility responds; and the re-call opened either when the expiry approaches or the moment the dig date is moved past it. This pair is the reason the build exists.
The private-line waiver chase
Irrigation, invisible fence, pool wiring, landscape lighting, shed feeds, well and septic. Chased to signed, and unsigned blocks the dig — because this is the strike that actually happens and the locate ticket never covered it.
The two-event install and the cure hold
Post-set day confirmed with access, dog, codes and marked lines; the cure hold applied on completion; the build day released only when it clears. The message during the gap says it is cure time, in your words.
The automated-gate documentation gate and the walkthrough
No final payment on a gate job without the safety checklist and photos on the record. The walkthrough is tasked to the salesperson, gates final payment, and produces the photo set that is both your warranty baseline and your best referral asset.
The register, and the slow clocks
Two warranty dates stamped at completion, the day-60 gate check booked, the stain date computed and material-suppressed, the frost-heave wave batched for spring by install date and territory, the neighbor ask, the temporary-fence rental anniversary and pickup, and the Q4 reactivation. Plus the compliance rails, which never switch off.
Built against the trade, not against a template.
automations written for fencing specifically — intake, the measure lifecycle, quote expiry, the gate stack, the register and the compliance rails.
named stages across three boards, because a backyard privacy fence, a job waiting on three approvals and a bonded perimeter contract are three different businesses.
calendars with real durations — and the install is two of them, with an unbookable cure hold in between.
gates between the deposit and the first post hole. Four of them fire because a date moved.
the published quote window for wood-heavy fence work — against the thirty-day default a generic contractor template ships with.
Stage, calendar, gate and automation counts are what ships in your account. The review windows, approval expiries, locate notice periods, cure times, deposit norms, quote validity, lumber prices, backlog spreads, frost depths, warranty terms and stain timings on this page are published industry and trade research collected in our own fencing operations research (2026), presented as ranges because that is how they were published. They describe the trade, not a result we are offering you.
Your first thirty days.
- Days 1–3
Your boards exist before you log in
All three, all 29 stages, four calendars with the durations already set, and the fields the measure checklist and the gate stack need. You are not handed an empty pipeline and a video about how to build one.
- Days 3–7
Intake goes live, and it asks fencing questions
Approximate footage, material, height, gate count, whether any gate is automated, terrain, whether there is an architectural review to clear, and the reason it is happening now — a new dog, a new pool, a failing fence, storm damage, a violation notice. Plus the one question worth more than the rest: do you know where your property line is, and how do you know? Missed-call text-back switched on the same day.
- Week 2
The things we need from you
Your service area and office hours, your review link, your deposit percentage, your quote validity window, who pulls permits in your market, and — the important one — your own locate center’s notice period and ticket lifetime. Half an hour of answers, and the whole gate stack is calibrated on it.
- Week 3
Payments connected
Square processing, dual-priced invoicing, the deposit invoice wired to compute from your percentage against the quoted amount, and final payment gated behind the walkthrough. The deposit product ships at zero cents on purpose, so no literal price can ever be quietly wrong.
- Week 4
The clocks start
Every sold job carrying its approval expiry, its locate expiry and its install date, with the re-call watch armed on all three. Completed jobs carrying two warranty dates, a gate check, and a stain date that knows what the fence is made of. From here the most valuable thing your software does is compare two dates every morning.
Every automation ends at a payment. So we own that part too.
Follow-up that ends in “I’ll send an invoice” is half a system. Your account runs on Square for processing, with dual-priced invoicing on top: the cash price is the price, and a customer paying by card sees the card price beside it and chooses.
The deposit is the gate, and it ships without a price
Every operator takes a different deposit, so the deposit line carries no literal amount — it is always computed from your percentage against the quoted amount, with a payment schedule that overrides it on a job that needs one. Published trade practice is roughly ~30–50% before materials are ordered, and the board will not record material as ordered until it clears.
Final payment waits for the walkthrough
Not for build-done. The walkthrough is where the photo set is taken and where anything unfinished gets named while a crew is still in the neighborhood. Invoicing off the walkthrough rather than off the last picket is the difference between a punch item and a dispute.
Two payers on one fence, billed as two
A cost-share job with a neighbor gets its own record and its own balance rather than one invoice and a handshake. It is the cheapest thing you can do in month one to avoid a collections conversation in month four.
Dual pricing on volume you already run
Deposits, final payments, change orders and monthly temporary-fence rental are steady card volume at roughly ~3%. Every invoice and pay link carries the cash price with the derived card price shown beside it, and the customer chooses every time. Nobody is surcharged in the dark.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — all three boards, the gate stack, the register, the compliance rails, the payment rails. The difference is how much marketing and reporting surface you want on top.
- CRM and all three pipelines
- Unified inbox — text, email, chat
- Four calendars and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys — the fencing estimate request
- AI lead follow-up
- Payments and invoicing
- Everything in Starter
- Full marketing suite
- Reputation management — the review request with its suppression rules
- Social planner
- Memberships and recurring billing — the temporary-fence rental book
- Documents and contracts — e-signed agreements and layout acknowledgements
- Advanced reporting — measure-to-sold, gate stack aging, callback rate
- Priority support
Fair questions.
Half my customers hand me a check at the walkthrough. Dual pricing will scare them off.
Dual pricing is built for exactly that base. The cash price is their price — nothing about a check or cash customer’s experience changes. The card price is derived and shown beside it, and the customer chooses every time. In a trade where deposits arrive as checks and finals arrive at the tailgate, this is the easy case rather than the hard one.
I quote from a drawing in fence software. I’m not ripping that out.
Don’t. The drawing is your proposal and your takeoff, and that stays where it is — the split between an estimating and field stack and a marketing and follow-up stack is the documented best practice in this industry. What moves is the layer around it: intake, the measure lifecycle, quote expiry, the gate stack, the register, and who processes the cards. The gate stack reads the dates. It does not try to become your takeoff tool.
I’m booked eight weeks out in June. I don’t need more leads.
Agreed, and that is not what this is. In June the risk is not an empty calendar — it is a sold job sitting behind a board meeting with an approval that expires, a locate ticket that dies during a three-week slip, and a customer who paid you in April and has decided you are avoiding her. This build is aimed at the backlog, not at filling it. The lead-generation half is the part that matters in Q4, when capacity exists and the work is discretionary.
It’s me, a foreman and two crews. This is built for a thirty-truck company.
It is built for the opposite. A thirty-truck company has a production manager whose entire job is comparing install dates against ticket expiries every morning. At two crews you are quoting, measuring, running the phone and standing in a yard at 4pm — and the date comparison is the exact thing you have no spare attention for. The gate stack is the part of this that does not scale down, which is why it is the part worth automating first.
Why not stay on the processor I’ve got, and why would I switch mid-season?
Two concrete reasons, and one on timing. Dual pricing exists on the Square path — on most other processors the card cost simply leaves the building with no mechanism to hand any of it back. Square adds things that matter to a trade with a truck and a tailgate: card-present hardware and next-day deposits, which are real when payroll runs weekly. On timing: you would not do this in June. Q4 is when this trade has the capacity to change anything, which is the same window the build is aimed at for the book-now offer.
Is this a generic CRM with a fence sticker on it?
Ask it three questions. Does it hold your locate expiry as a date and compare it to your install date? Does it know that a stain campaign has to be suppressed on vinyl? Does it model the build as two events with an unbookable gap? We went shopping before we built this: the fencing snapshot we found on sale still carried a med-spa page title, sold a “fully loaded” med-spa package in its pricing section, and twice described fence contractors delivering treatments. Another vendor’s fence listing was the same sentence used beside dumpster rental, septic and roofing with the trade noun swapped. That is what a renamed template looks like from the outside, and it is the whole reason this one is built from the trade’s own dates.
Somewhere on your board right now is a job whose dig date has moved past its ticket.
Board now and the boards are built, the intake asks fencing questions, and every sold job is carrying its three clocks with the re-call watch armed — instead of starting to watch on the morning a crew calls in from a driveway asking whether the marks are still good.
Automate With Us provides software and configuration services. Figures shown are published industry research or illustrative examples — they are not projections, guarantees, or representations of the results you should expect. Individual results depend on your market, pricing, staffing and execution. Review windows, approval expiries, permit timelines, locate notice periods and ticket lifetimes, tolerance-zone distances, concrete cure times, deposit norms, quote-validity windows, lumber prices, seasonal backlogs and pricing spreads, frost depths, warranty terms and stain timings are published ranges that vary by market, jurisdiction, material and season, and the job illustrations on this page are worked examples rather than forecasts. Processing costs vary by card mix and volume; the ~3% figure is illustrative and your effective rate will differ. Payment processing is provided through Square and is subject to Square’s approval and terms. Text-message and email sending are subject to carrier and regulatory registration. Nothing on this page is legal advice. Excavation-notice requirements, ticket lifetimes, tolerance zones, penalties and liability allocation are set by your own state and your own locate center; property-line questions belong with a licensed surveyor and your own counsel; shared-fence and cost-share statutes differ by state and none is asserted here; permit responsibility varies by market and by contract. Automated-gate entrapment-protection practices described here are published industry safety standards from the trade bodies — we make no claim about whether any of them is codified as law where you work, and the documentation the build collects is a record, not a certification. The property-line, private-utility and gate-documentation rails are our own conservative configuration choices drawn from published operator practice. Terms · Privacy