Sold isn’t the finish line. It’s where thirteen more stages start.
The selling half of a flooring job is eight stages and it ends at “Sold — Deposit Taken.” What begins there is a supply chain with physics in it: a mill lead time, a slab that has to test dry, wood that has to reach equilibrium, and whatever is underneath the old floor.
Most software collapses all of that into Scheduled → Installed. Your account opens with both boards, named the way this trade names them — and with the follow-up pointed at the weeks where the deposit is already spent, the material is already bought, and nobody is talking to the customer.
The deposit is in and the material is bought. Every date left on this job belongs to a mill, a slab, or the wood itself.
One job. Two completely different halves.
Run the whole thing through one stage set and everything after the deposit becomes a single box called Scheduled. Six of the eight ways a flooring job goes wrong happen inside that box, and four of them are waits your company does not control. Here are both halves, running.
Eight stages. Samples, a measure, a quote read against two other bids, and a decision made with a spouse. It ends the moment the deposit is taken.
- New Lead
- Appointment Set
- Selection In Progress (samples out)
- Measured
- Quoted
- Follow-Up
- Sold — Deposit Takenthe seam
- Lost
The last stage you fully control. Everything on this board is your own people, your own calendar and your own decisions — which is exactly why it is the half that every template models well.
Thirteen stages. It starts where board one ended, with the money already taken and the material already bought. Five of the thirteen are waits.
- Check-Measure Verified
- Material Ordered
- Material Received & Lot-Verified
- Delivered to Site
- Acclimating
- Moisture Test Passed
- Tear-Out
- Subfloor Prep / Change Order
- Installing
- Cure Lockout
- Final Walkthrough
- Final Payment
- Warranty Registered
Five stages where nobody from your company is working and the job still cannot move: a mill, a slab, the wood itself, whatever is under the old floor, and a finish that has to cure with no furniture on it.
The stage names are not illustrative. Those are the two boards your account actually opens with, in order, spelled exactly as they appear in the build — down to Lost sitting at the bottom of board one and Cure Lockout sitting near the end of board two. We went looking for a flooring vendor who publishes theirs. Nobody does.
Four clocks start at the same moment, and you own none of them.
This is the part of the job where your money is already out the door — the deposit banked, the material bought, the customer’s rooms committed — and where every published flooring template goes quiet. Each of these is a stage on your board with a date field, an owner and a nudge attached.
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Clock one
The mill
Lead time belongs to your supplier. The board holds the job in a waiting state: the customer hears, at a low cadence, that nothing has gone wrong, and the office gets nudged about the order that is late. Three silent weeks is where cancellations and one-star reviews get written. If the color is discontinued or backordered, the reselection is a real transition — the signed contract and the deposit stay attached to the job instead of being lost and re-created.
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Clock two
The slab
The concrete moisture test is not one appointment. Under ASTM F2170 the slab and the air above it sit at service conditions with the HVAC running for 48 hours before anyone tests, the probes are read 24 hours after they go in, and the minimum is three test holes for the first 1,000 sq ft. Two visits and a precondition, for what a stock CRM calls a single booking — and on a slab job it is sequenced before the material is delivered, not after.
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Clock three
The wood
The material is in the customer’s rooms and nobody is working. Both of the published dealer contracts we read state a three-day minimum in the house. But the trade’s real rule is not a day count — it is the moisture-content difference between the flooring and the subfloor, within 4% for strip under 3″ and 2% for plank 3″ and wider, with the site held at 30–50% relative humidity. Your board carries both, and whichever finishes later releases the gate.
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Clock four
Whatever is under the old floor
The old floor is in the dumpster, the house is unusable and a crew you are paying is standing in the room. A change order presented at that moment is coercive by circumstance and it is the single largest source of one-star flooring reviews. Two things defuse it: a not-to-exceed prep allowance agreed at signing, so the common case needs no decision at all — and a photo-and-decision loop measured in hours, with the crew’s photos, priced options and a written approval, which escalates to the owner when the window is breached.
The allowance and the response window are ours — a designed default, not a trade standard, and both are values you set. Every published source describes the problem; none of them publishes the fix, so we are telling you which parts of this page are measured and which parts are our design.
The sample went home. The customer didn’t.
A walk-in who browses, takes three samples and leaves without a record is invisible to every automation you own. A physical sample leaving the building is the highest-intent signal in the store and the most commonly dropped thread in the trade — which is why the capture that matters is at sample checkout, not at the end of a nurture. It is a short form the salesperson or the customer finishes at the counter, and it opens a dated obligation on the board rather than a note in somebody’s head.
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Day 0
The quote, itemized the way a three-bid comparison is actually won
Prep scope and the not-to-exceed allowance, furniture scope with its exclusion list, transitions, stairs, removal and haul-away as their own named lines, the waste percentage, and the ordered square footage sitting beside the net figure. Every line a competitor hides is a line you get compared on later.
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Day 1
A text about the samples, not about the price
“Still have all three? Want me to swap the middle one?” The sample is the reason to make contact, and it is a better reason than a discount. It also tells you which board stage the job is really in.
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Day 3
A call task on the salesperson who sold it
On their name, on their list, with the quote and the selection already attached — not into a shared queue where it becomes nobody’s.
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Day 7
The lead-time consequence
“This color is a three-week order — to land your date we would need to place it by Friday.” That is flooring’s honest scarcity. You never have to invent urgency in a trade where the calendar is genuinely the constraint.
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Day 14
The direct ask, financing, and the date the price stops being good
Material and freight move. A quote that is honored months later is a margin decision somebody made by not deciding.
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Day 30
The quote expires and the file moves — it does not die
Re-validation is required before it is honored, and the job joins the winter reactivation list instead of aging quietly at the bottom of somebody’s inbox.
Every interval above is our designed default and a value you can change. We went looking for a published flooring follow-up cadence and there is not one — this trade’s public material is retail marketing, not operator data. Rather than dress a number up as research, we shaped the sequence around what the decision actually is: made with a spouse, against physical samples, against two other bids, on a product with a lead time.
You are not losing on price. You are losing on the line items.
Flooring quotes get compared per square foot, and the comparison is structurally apples-to-oranges: material only against installed, prep in against prep out, furniture moving included against per item, and waste billed on the quantity ordered against the quantity installed. The quote that itemizes wins the second conversation, because the customer can finally see what the cheap one left out.
Ordered, not installed — and it is a trade convention, not your policy
Two independently published dealer contracts state it the same way: installation charges are based on the amount of material needed, not the amount installed, with roughly 10% overage built into the calculation so the material can be cut, seamed and trimmed. Left-over material is not a refund. Say it on the quote in your own words and it is a convention; leave it for the complaint and it is a dispute.
Waste is a product decision, not a blanket number
Roughly 5–10% for carpet in simple rectangular rooms; about 10% for straight-lay tile, more on the diagonal, more again on a mosaic or a pattern repeat; around 15–17% for herringbone. The system keeps it as a human decision recorded on the job and shown on the quote — it will not compute one silently, because a 5% factor on a diagonal or a patterned broadloom runs the order short before the job finishes.
Short is not a top-up. It is a different dye lot.
This is why the check measure is a separate stage and a margin control: the selling measure is done to sell, the check measure is done to order, and it happens before the order goes in. It is also why lot and batch numbers are captured at receiving rather than at ordering — what arrives is what the warranty gets argued about, and a mixed delivery forces the documented inspection before the job may advance.
Stairs, transitions and the doorway nobody measured
Stairs are priced per step, not per square foot, and a tread count entered wrong is a several-hundred-dollar error nobody catches until install day. Transitions are counted per doorway with the finished floor-height difference to each adjacent surface — the field that decides whether the interior doors still close.
A work order is not a quote.
Property-manager unit turns, builder work and commercial jobs run against a standing spec and a rate sheet. There is no showroom selection, no consumer deposit, and the clock is vacancy days rather than customer preference — a standard turn targets roughly 5–7 days, about 10–14 when flooring is in it. A consumer stage set is wrong in every single stage name for that work, so it gets its own board.
Trade / Builder Accounts
Six stages · the unit of work is a work order against a standing spec- Account Target
- Walkthrough & Spec Standardization
- Rate Sheet + Terms Proposed
- Approved
- Active — Work Orders
- Dormant
Dormant is a stage on purpose. An account that has not issued a work order in 60–90 days is a nudge, not a lost customer — and the nudge exists to keep the spec-holder relationship warm rather than to sell a job, because the dealer holding the standing spec is the one who holds the account. On this lane the consumer sends are suppressed outright: the prep list, the expectation-setting message and the review ask all stay off, because the payer is not the occupant.
A delivery is not an install. A test is not a visit.
These are six genuinely different events with different durations, different resources and completely different reminder copy — bring nothing to a shop-at-home, have the HVAC running for a moisture test, have the china cabinet emptied for an install. Two of them are not the customer’s choice at all; the job dictates them.
A rep, a sample kit and a van. Usually merges with the measure, and it is a different front on the same order process — not a second pipeline.
Two distinct visits to the same property, days apart. The second one is what the order is placed from.
Its own event, days before the install on a wood job, and the one that starts the acclimation clock. The confirm carries the facts that actually strand a truck: nobody under 18 can accept the delivery, no cash on delivery, an elevator has to be reserved above the third floor, the HVAC has to be running, and damage has a short window to be reported.
Booked twice, at least 24 hours apart, behind a 48-hour site-condition precondition. The install cannot be scheduled until the record exists and passes.
Multi-day and room-sequenced, with skill-based crews — carpet, hardwood, tile and sand-and-finish are four different crews and they are not interchangeable.
Where the attic stock is handed over with its lot number and storage location, the care instructions are given, and the manufacturer registration is done.
The material is in the house, the customer’s rooms are occupied, and nobody is working. A dated gate with two release conditions, not a booking.
A blackout window on the property after a refinish: furniture back at 24 hours, rugs withheld for days depending on the product, and a warning that covering the floor stops the cure. A date-driven instruction sequence — and the reason the review request must not fire when the crew leaves.
The two gates that make the board honest
A stock CRM has one shape for “waiting”: an appointment that has not happened yet. Flooring has two states where the property is committed, the money is spent, and there is deliberately nobody on site. Model them as appointments and your board reads as stalled; leave them out and your board lies. They are stages, with dates and release conditions:
- Minimum days in the house, counted from the delivery date
- The moisture-content difference that actually releases the wood
- The cure date the customer must not put furniture on
- The review request held until both have released
Four things the system is built to be incapable of.
These ship switched on, they market nothing, and they exist because the cost of getting them wrong in this trade is not a lost lead.
While a job is flagged as needing a test and the test has not passed, the job is held and install scheduling stays shut. A failed test is a real state with its own branch — notify, price the mitigation, raise the change order, re-test, release — not an error somebody works around. The reason is contractual rather than legal: moisture is the most frequently cited exclusion in product and installation warranties, and claims are routinely denied where pre-installation testing was not performed or documented. The test is done by qualified people on site. The system holds the job and keeps the file.
Where a pre-1980 resilient tile or the black cutback mastic under it is suspected, the job stops and goes to a licensed specialist. The system will not generate copy offering to remove, disturb or dispose of it, it does not price it, and it offers no guidance whatsoever on handling it — that conversation is not ours to have and not yours to have on a text message. This is our own conservative boundary, applied because generating “we’ll rip that out for you” over a suspect substrate is not a risk worth taking.
Warranty Registered is a stage on the board and the registration is tracked to it. Beyond that the system stays quiet: no copy it can generate promises an exact color match to a sample, or treats shading, pooling, water marking, shedding, fluffing or pile crushing as defects — published dealer terms exclude all of them as inherent characteristics, so a system that promises otherwise is manufacturing disputes for you. It also states no workmanship term, because no public source publishes one; that field is yours to set.
Opt-outs, do-not-contact and suppression are wired before anything else sends, and they outrank every sequence in the account. The review request is gated on top of that: it will not fire during a cure lockout, on an open change order, on an unresolved lot or substrate problem, on an unpaid balance, on a trade account, or on any job with an open callback or manufacturer claim.
Reputation is worth saying out loud in this trade: an online review score is one of the scored inputs in a major manufacturer’s aligned-dealer tiering, which is a program consequence most trades simply do not have. Which is exactly why the review request is gated rather than automatic.
Three boards, two crewless gates, one seam.
Not close rate. What decides a flooring year is whether the jobs you have already sold move through the half of the process that physics controls — without the customer filling the silence in for themselves.
Named stages across the three boards your account opens with: eight on the selling board, thirteen on supply and install, six on trade accounts. These are build values, not estimates.
The site-condition precondition under ASTM F2170 — slab and air at service conditions with the HVAC running — before a concrete moisture test may even begin, with the probes read 24 hours after they go in.
The minimum time in the house before installation stated in both of the published dealer contracts we read. The trade’s actual release condition is the moisture-content difference, which is why your board carries both.
More likely to qualify a lead when first contact happens inside the first hour, across ~1.25 million leads studied by Harvard Business Review — which is the whole argument for answering a missed showroom call by text.
Figures are published industry research, published standards, quoted contract conventions, this build’s own configured values, or illustrative examples — they are not a projection of your results. Test standards and manufacturer instructions govern their own subject matter and are summarized here, not restated; the product’s own limit always governs, and where an adhesive or a manufacturer specifies something tighter, theirs wins. The response-time study is cross-industry and directionally relevant to home services rather than native to it.
Your first thirty days.
Configuration is ours, not yours. Here is the sequence — and the one point where we need something only you can give us.
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Week one
The three boards go in, with your product lines on them
Selling, supply and install, and trade accounts — built, named and in order. Your product categories, service area and company details are set as account values once, so nothing has to be typed twice later.
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Week two
Intake, calendars and the missed-call text-back go live
The project intake that asks for the subfloor answer rather than just a name and a phone number, the sample-checkout capture for the counter, the shop-at-home request, and six calendars with per-event reminder copy. Text and email sending is registered in your business’s name — we prepare it, you sign it.
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Week three
The gap after the deposit gets wired
The waiting-state updates, the lot verification at receiving, the acclimation and cure gates with their date fields, the moisture hold, and the change-order loop with your allowance and your response window in it. This is the week that is different from every other trade we build.
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Week four
Money, reviews and the things only you can decide
Deposit and final-payment invoicing, the gated review request pointed at your review link, and the reactivation lane. Four values are yours and we will not invent them: your default deposit percentage, your prep allowance, your change-order response window, and your workmanship warranty term.
Every automation on this page ends at a payment. So we own that part too.
A flooring job collects at least twice — the deposit that turns a quote into an order, and the balance that closes it — with a change order landing in between, at the worst possible moment, needing a written approval.
The deposit, in the same motion as the signature
Sold is a deposit event. The agreement is signed, the deposit invoice fires against your own default percentage of the quoted amount, and the job moves to the second board. The order does not go to the mill on a promise.
The change order, approved in writing, from a phone, in the room
Photos of the exposed substrate, priced options, and an approval recorded with a timestamp and a channel. Published dealer terms already accept a written electronic approval; the point is that it exists in the file rather than in somebody’s memory of a conversation held over a dumpster.
The balance, held against the gates that should hold it
Final payment sits on the board after the walkthrough, and an unpaid balance is one of the conditions that suppresses the review request — because asking for five stars while you are still owed money is how you get neither.
Dual pricing on the card volume you actually run
Card processing costs a business around 3% and that money simply leaves. Dual pricing shows a cash price with the card price derived beside it, on every invoice and payment link, and the customer chooses every time — nobody is surcharged in the dark. On a check or a bank transfer nothing changes, because the cash price was already their price.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — all three boards, the gate fields, 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
- Six calendars and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys — the project intake and the sample checkout
- 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
- Documents and contracts — e-signed proposals and change orders
- Advanced reporting
- Priority support
Fair questions.
Most of my deposits come in as checks. What does dual pricing actually do for me?
Nothing at all on those, and that is the point — a check payer’s experience does not change, because the cash price is already their price. What it works on is the card volume you do run: deposits taken at the counter, balances paid by link, change orders approved and paid from a phone, repairs, stair jobs, and the retail sale that walks in and buys material. That is steady, unglamorous volume at around 3%, and dual pricing hands that cost back on all of it.
I already run a flooring estimating and measurement system. I’m not ripping it out.
Don’t. Room-level takeoff, seam plans, ordering and job costing stay exactly where they are — those are measurement applications and building a worse one inside a CRM would be a bad trade. What moves is the layer above them: the three boards, the gates and their dates, the follow-up that chases samples and mills, the customer communication during the wait, and the money. This board tells your ordering system which jobs are real; it does not try to cut a carpet.
My salespeople will never log a walk-in. That is just how showrooms are.
Which is why the capture is at sample checkout rather than at the door. Nobody is asked to log a browser — they are asked to write down who is walking out with three of your samples, which is a thing every showroom already wants to know and almost none of them can answer a week later. It is a short form on a tablet at the counter, and it is the only entry point on this page that has to happen by hand.
January and February are dead. Why am I paying in the trough?
Because the trough is when the back half of last year’s work is worth money. The quotes that expired unworked, the customers who bought one room and always meant to do the hallway, the trade accounts that quietly stopped issuing work orders, the warranty registrations still sitting unfiled — that is exactly the work with no urgency attached to it, which is why it never gets done by hand. It also happens to be when the first heating season hits the hardwood you installed in the fall, and the customer who was warned about seasonal gapping in advance does not call it a defect.
Thirteen stages after the sale is a lot of clicking. My installers won’t do it.
They are not being asked to. Most of those stages move off a date or a field that somebody already records — the delivery date, the lot number written on the carton, the test result, the approval text. The gates exist so the board can hold a job honestly instead of showing thirteen jobs all sitting in Scheduled, and so the office knows which of them is actually waiting on a mill this morning. If a stage needs a human, the system asks one person for one thing.
Is this a generic CRM with a flooring sticker on it?
No, and the stage names above are the first test — those are the boards your account opens with, and no vendor selling a flooring snapshot publishes theirs. The second test is what you cannot buy anywhere: we went looking for a flooring build that ships an acclimation gate with a moisture-content release, a two-visit substrate test the install cannot be scheduled around, lot verification at receiving, a cure lockout that suppresses the review ask, and a change-order loop measured in hours. What is publicly sold is the same niche paragraph with the trade noun swapped — one flooring listing still carries medical treatment language, another ships with the filler text still in it and three different prices on one page. That gap is why this build exists.
The next order you place has three silent weeks in it. Right now nobody owns them.
Board now and all three boards are built, the intakes are live and the gap after the deposit is covered before your next job falls into it — instead of during.
Automate With Us provides software and configuration services. Figures shown are published industry research, published test standards, quoted contract conventions, this build’s own configured values, or illustrative examples — they are not projections, guarantees, or representations of the results you should expect. Individual results depend on your market, pricing, capacity and execution. 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. Moisture testing, acclimation and substrate assessment are performed by qualified people on site: this software records the result, times the gate and holds the job — it does not decide whether a floor may be installed, and nothing here is a substitute for the applicable test standard or the manufacturer’s written instructions, which govern. The system tracks manufacturer warranty registration; it does not extend, alter, administer or underwrite any manufacturer’s or installer’s warranty, and it makes no representation about what any warranty covers. Where a pre-1980 resilient floor or cutback mastic is suspected, the system stops the job and refers it out; nothing here is guidance on testing, handling or disposing of that material. Licensing, disclosure and testing requirements are set by standards bodies, states, jurisdictions and manufacturer programs and vary; rules referenced here are attributed to the places they were measured, and your account is configured to your own jurisdiction as you confirm it. Terms · Privacy