Half the jobs you get asked to price never needed the drive.
Twenty-five minutes out to look at a closet door that will not latch, twenty-five minutes back, and a quote typed at nine at night — on a job that pays for two hours of work. A large share of handyman work is priced from a phone call and a few photos, with no truck involved at all. The rest genuinely needs your eyes on it, and pricing that from a photo is how you end up eating the difference in somebody’s crawlspace.
Your account opens with that fork already built: an intake that asks the questions which decide the lane, both lanes sitting on the board as their own named stages, and follow-up that knows which one a job is in.
Three photos and four answers moved this without anybody driving anywhere. The gutter on the same list did not qualify — it is on the other lane, with a visit already offered.
One trade. Two completely different ways to price a job.
Send every lead down one path and you get one of two failures: you drive to jobs that never needed you, or you quote jobs you have not seen. Both are paid for out of the same thin margin on a small ticket. Here are the two boards your account opens with — and the fork sitting in the second and third stage of the first one.
Seven stages, and two of them are the two ways a job gets priced. A card here either has a short call on it and no vehicle, or a visit with an arrival window and a drive.
- New Lead
- Photo / Phone Qualifyno truck
- Assessment Scheduledeyes on it
- Quote Sent
- Follow-Up
- On Hold
- Booked / Won
On Hold is a stage, not a sticky note. Pausing the chase on a customer who has asked for time is a daily need in this trade, and “I’ll remember” is not a pause. Moving a card in suspends every automated touch on it; moving it back out picks up where the sequence stopped.
Six stages. A handyman job is one or two visits, not a multi-week production run — so this is a dispatch board, and its last two stages are the money.
- Unscheduled
- Scheduled
- In Progress
- Completed
- Invoice Sent
- Paid / Closedthe money lands
The handoff between the boards is automatic. Winning the job on board one opens the card on board two with the block size already on it, so nothing is retyped, nothing gets scheduled twice, and the invoice fires off a stage change rather than off somebody remembering on Friday.
Those stage names are not illustrative. They are the two boards your account opens with, in order, spelled exactly as they appear in the build — down to the slash in Photo / Phone Qualify and On Hold sitting between Follow-Up and Booked / Won. We went looking for a handyman snapshot vendor who publishes theirs. What the listings publish is a feature list and a price.
Four questions the intake asks so your truck does not have to.
None of these is a mood read. They are answers a form can actually collect, and each one moves the job onto a lane, a calendar and a price shape before anybody picks up keys.
-
Question one
Can it be seen?
Three photos of a dripping trap tell you more than standing in the room would, and they arrive at 7:41 in the morning instead of Thursday afternoon. The intake takes photo uploads onto the record itself rather than into an inbox, and the routing reads them: no photos means no phone-quote lane, because a lane the system guesses at is worse than no lane at all.
-
Question two
Is the cause known?
A door that will not latch is a flat-rate item. A door that will not latch because the frame moved is a different job. Unknown cause, more than one trade in it, or more than about half a day of work goes to a visit no matter how good the photos are — because that is the quote you otherwise have to renegotiate standing in somebody’s hallway, which is the worst room in the world to raise a price in.
-
Question three
Is it above your minimum?
Published service-call minimums in this trade run roughly $125 to $200, and the visit is two hours before anything else is counted. Somebody whose job is under your minimum should hear that in the first reply, not after you have driven there. The board even has a named reason for it — Below Minimum — because a job you correctly turned down is data, not a failure, and knowing how many of those you get is how you decide whether to raise the number.
-
Question four
Who is at the property, and how old is it?
The three things that turn a booked job into a wasted trip: nobody on site who can authorize the work, a locked gate or a dog or no parking, and a house old enough that the work has a rule attached to it. Owner or tenant or property manager, the access notes, and the year-built question are all intake answers — and the last of them stops the job rather than pricing it.
The half-day threshold and the routing rules are our designed defaults, and every one of them is a value you set. What is not ours is the shape: this trade’s own published practice is that clearly-describable routine work is priced on the phone and that a site visit spends the margin, while unknown cause gets eyes on it.
You were up a ladder when they answered.
The competitive fact of this trade is that the person deciding contacted three businesses at once, and the first real reply usually wins. The problem was never that you did not want to answer. It is that your hands are full of somebody else’s ceiling fan from eight until four.
A missed call is not a voicemail
It is a person who is already dialing the next number. A missed call sends a text back to the caller within seconds and a notification to you, and it is tagged as its own source so you can see at the end of the month how much of your work arrived as a call you could not take. After hours it sends your own after-hours message instead of silence.
Inside the hour, not inside the day
Across roughly 1.25 million leads studied by Harvard Business Review, first contact inside the first hour made a lead about ~7× more likely to be qualified. Roughly ~78% of customers hire the first company that responds, and only about ~12% of contractors manage a reply inside five minutes. In this trade that gap is unusually cheap to close, because your first reply is a text and your first quote is a phone call — there is no truck to send.
A first reply that does a job
“Thanks for reaching out, we’ll be in touch” costs you the same minute and buys nothing. The automatic first reply asks for the two or three things the lane decision actually needs — a photo, what it is doing, when they are home — so that by the time you climb down, the job is either priced or booked for a look.
Every front door, one board
Web form, chat widget, social lead form, your business profile, and the call you missed each get their own intake that stamps where the job came from, opens the card in New Lead and starts the same clock. The report at the end of the month is then about where the money came from, rather than about where you think it came from.
The quote has fourteen days. Most of them get none of yours.
A published platform default in this category fires its first estimate follow-up on day seven. By then the person has hired somebody. This sequence is ours, it runs itself, and it stops the moment it should.
-
Day 0
The quote goes out as a task list, not as a number
One line per task, each with its own estimated hours and its own flat price, so the customer can add the two things they were not going to mention and take off the one they will do themselves. Your service-call minimum is stated once, on the quote, where it is a policy rather than a surprise. Fourteen days on the clock.
-
Day 1
A short text with the booking link in it
Same day is better and this is the touch the category’s defaults skip entirely. It is one sentence and a link, not a pitch.
-
Day 3
Text and email, carrying the date it expires
The expiry is real and it is the honest reason to make contact: materials move and your calendar fills. You never have to invent urgency in a trade where next Thursday genuinely does get taken.
-
Day 7
Last chance, in a logistics tone
Not pressure. “Do you still want this on the calendar, and is the same week still right?” Plus a nudge on your side if a card has been sitting in Quote Sent for more than ten days.
-
Day 30
The quote is expired. The customer is not.
A softer re-engagement with the season on it — gutters in the fall, interior work in the winter — because the person who wanted a job done in March usually still wants it done, and they will get it done by whoever is in front of them in October.
-
Any day
It stops on a yes — including a yes said out loud on the phone
An acceptance halts the sequence within about a minute, a stop reply halts it permanently, and moving the card to On Hold suspends everything without deleting anything. Nobody gets chased for a quote they already accepted, which is the failure that makes owners turn follow-up off entirely.
Every interval above is a value you set. The shape is the converged practice across the three field-service platforms this build was researched against; the day-one touch is the part their own defaults get wrong. Lost jobs are required to carry a reason before they close — price, competitor, no response, timing, below minimum, out of area, do-it-yourself, needs a licensed trade — because a reason list is the only way the next quarter’s pricing conversation has anything in it.
You do not sell tasks. You sell the trip.
The margin problem in this trade was never the price of a task. It is the drive between two of them. So the calendar sells time in blocks, and the two quote lanes get their own events — because a fifteen-minute pricing call and a thirty-minute assessment are not the same thing and must never land in the same slot.
The lane with no truck in it: flat-rate menu work priced off the photos already on the record. The cheapest sales call you will ever run.
Scope unclear, more than one trade, or bigger than half a day. A two-hour arrival window goes in every reminder, because a date with no window is how a booking becomes a complaint.
The whole point of the list on the fridge: one drive, several tasks, one profitable trip. An hour minimum per task, two hours minimum for the visit.
Four hours of craftsman time, sold as time rather than as a list. The customer picks what goes in it and you are not quoting six separate things.
Punch-list days, move-in and move-out work, and the small-remodel tail you graduate into without meaning to.
Re-performance under the one-year labor standard this category holds itself to, on its own calendar so it never looks like revenue. Counting callbacks is the only way to find out what they actually cost you.
The list on the fridge is five jobs, and four of them are not in the message
Somebody calls about a closet door. There are four other things on that list and two more the tech will spot on the way out. A stock build stores that as one text thread and a price. This one stores it as fields, because those fields are what let you turn a twenty-minute errand into a booked two-hour visit:
- One line per task, with its own hours and its own flat price
- The block the job was actually booked into
- Whether you are supplying the materials or they are
- What the tech noticed that is not on this invoice
Nobody forgets you. They just call whoever is in front of them.
A handyman relationship is recurring by nature and almost never recurring in practice, because there is no reason for the second call to land on your number instead of a search result. Four things in this build exist purely to be that reason, and none of them is a newsletter.
Month eleven, before the labor warranty runs out
A check-in fires before the labor warranty term you set runs out — anything not right, come back and put it right. It is the cheapest goodwill in the trade, and it puts you back in the house eleven months later with a list already forming.
The thing the tech noticed and never told anybody
There is a field on the job for follow-up work spotted on site. If it has anything in it when the job closes, it becomes a task on your list and a text two weeks later. Your own tech’s note is the warmest lead the business owns and it currently lives in a truck.
Fall is the best month you are not selling
Seasonal checklists go to the whole past-customer list on a cap of one or two a week: gutters and screens and deck checks in spring, weatherproofing and the second gutter clean and detector batteries in fall, interior work in winter aimed specifically at people who only ever bought exterior work from you. Checklist-shaped, dated, and about their house rather than about you.
The plan that makes them call you first
Three maintenance tiers ship configured — visits a year, a response-time promise, and waived or reduced service charges, which the research says is what customers are actually buying. They ship at $49, $79 and $139 a month as starting values you change, with renewal reminders and visit-scheduling reminders already wired to the dates.
Four things the system is built to be incapable of.
These ship switched on, they sell nothing, and they exist because the cost of getting them wrong in this trade is not a lost lead.
The intake asks when the home was built. If the answer is before 1978, the job is flagged and a task opens for you before anything is priced, because that work has a federal rule attached to it. What the system will not do is tell you what the rule says, price that work, or generate a single line of copy offering to do it. That is a conversation for people qualified to have it, and it is not one an automated text message gets to start. The software’s entire job here is making sure the question was asked and the answer is on the file.
When you mark a job as needing a trade you do not hold, it routes to a refer-out message instead of a four-touch follow-up sequence, and the reason is recorded so you can see how much of that you are turning away. The system makes no claim about what you may or may not perform — licensing is set by your state and by your own qualification, and that flag is yours. It simply stops selling something you have already told it is not yours to sell.
Under roughly $1,000 this build takes no deposit at all: payment on satisfaction at completion is the published standard in this category, and nothing strange gets inserted into a small job. Above that, deposit limits are set by state law and they differ — so the deposit product ships at zero and the amount is computed at invoice time from the term you selected at onboarding. A build that shipped a default percentage would be confidently wrong in several states, which is why this one refuses to have one.
Opt-outs, do-not-contact and quiet hours are wired before anything sends and they outrank every sequence in the account, with a cap on how often the past-customer list can be touched. The review request goes through an internal one-to-five rating first: the top scores get your public review link, and anything at three or below routes privately to you with a task on it. Nothing unhappy is ever pointed at a public profile.
None of the above is advice and none of it is a legal reading. Where a rule has a date or a limit in it, this page says where the rule comes from rather than telling you what it requires — and the two places this build deliberately refuses to be helpful are the two places being helpful would be the mistake.
Two boards, thirteen stages, one fork.
Not close rate. What decides a handyman year is how many of the leads you already have get priced without a drive, and how many of the customers you already have call you second.
Named stages across the two boards your account opens with: seven on sales, six on jobs. Build values, not estimates.
Calendars, with different durations and completely different reminder copy — because a fifteen-minute pricing call, an eight-hour block and an unbilled callback are three different events and one of them must never look like revenue.
The quote validity window this build ships with — materially shorter than a remodeler’s, because material prices move and the ticket is small. A value you set.
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 entire argument for answering a call you could not take by text.
Figures are published industry research, published category conventions, this build’s own configured values, or illustrative examples — they are not a projection of your results. The response-time study is cross-industry and directionally relevant to home services rather than native to it. Price ranges quoted as “published” are what operators and platforms in this trade publish; yours are yours, and the build asks you for them rather than assuming them.
Your first thirty days.
Configuration is ours, not yours. Here is the sequence — and the handful of points where we need something only you can give us.
-
Week one
Both boards go in, with your job types on them
Sales and jobs, built, named and in order, with the job-type list, the customer types, the source list and the lost reasons already populated. Your company details, service area and office hours are set as account values once, so nothing has to be typed twice later.
-
Week two
The intake, the photo upload and the missed-call text-back go live
The estimate request that asks the four questions the lane decision needs — including the photos — plus the six calendars with their own reminder copy and arrival windows. Text and email sending is registered in your business’s name: we prepare it, you sign it.
-
Week three
The fork and the chase get wired
The routing that stamps the lane, the seven-day new-lead sequence, the fourteen-day quote chase with its stop conditions, the On Hold pause, and no-show recovery on the assessment calendar. This is the week that is different from every other trade we build.
-
Week four
Money, reviews and the things only you can decide
Invoicing off the job board, the gated review request pointed at your own review link, the referral offer, the warranty check-in and the seasonal lists. Four values are yours and we will not invent them: your service-call minimum, your deposit term, your block prices, and your maintenance-plan pricing.
Every automation on this page ends in a driveway. So we own that part too.
On most of your jobs there is no deposit and no retainer. The whole cash cycle is one moment: the work is done, and either they pay right there or the balance starts aging while you drive to the next one.
The balance, texted before the truck is loaded
Marking the job complete moves the card to Invoice Sent and sends a payment link by text. They tap it standing in their own kitchen, the card is on the phone in their hand, and the card is on the card reader if they would rather do that. Either way Friday no longer has a collections call in it.
A deposit only where a deposit belongs
Small jobs stay exactly as they are, because inserting a deposit into a $240 job is how you lose it. On the larger work the deposit invoice fires when the job is won, at the deposit term you picked at onboarding, and the balance fires when the job is done. Bigger multi-visit work gets progress billing instead.
The change order, approved in writing, from the hallway
You opened the wall and it is worse. Photos, a priced option and a written approval recorded with a timestamp, from a phone, in the room — so the extra amount exists in the file rather than in two people’s different memories of a conversation held over a dust sheet.
Dual pricing on the card volume you already run
Card processing costs a business around ~3% and that money simply leaves. Dual pricing shows your cash price with the card price derived beside it, on every invoice and every payment link, and the customer chooses every time — nobody is surcharged in the dark. Cash and checks change nothing, because the cash price was already their price.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — both boards, the intake and its photo upload, the six calendars, the compliance rails, the payment rails. The difference is how much marketing and reporting surface you want on top.
- CRM and both pipelines
- Unified inbox — text, email, chat
- Six calendars and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys — the estimate request with photo upload
- AI lead follow-up
- Payments and invoicing
- Everything in Starter
- Full marketing suite
- Reputation management — the gated review request
- Social planner
- Memberships and recurring billing — the maintenance plans
- Documents and contracts — e-signed quotes and change orders
- Advanced reporting
- Priority support
Fair questions.
My jobs are too small for invoicing software.
Under about a grand this build does not invoice until the work is done — pay on satisfaction stays exactly as it is, because that is the category standard and nothing here is trying to change it. What changes is the collecting: the balance goes out by text the moment you mark the job complete, with a link on it. The small-job win was never deposits. It is never making a Friday phone call about money again.
My customers will walk if I add a card fee.
You are not adding a fee, you are posting two prices. Your price is the cash price; the card price is derived from it and shown right beside it, and the customer picks, every time. Gas stations have priced this way for decades. Your cash customers notice they are paying the lower number, and nothing about your checkout gets hidden or sprung on anybody.
Half my customers pay cash or check anyway.
Then dual pricing costs you nothing on those jobs, which is the point — they pay your posted price exactly as they do today. What it works on is the card volume you already run, which stops costing you ~3%. And the estimate chase, the automatic balance invoice and the review ask all work the same regardless of how anybody pays. This is not a bet on card volume; it is a fix for the card volume you already have.
I am one person with a truck. This is more system than I need.
The parts that need a human are the parts you are already doing: pricing the job and doing the work. Everything on this page fires off something you already record — a form arriving, a card moving, a job marked complete. If a step needs a decision, it asks one person for one thing. The reason a one-truck business needs this more, not less, is that a five-truck business has an office and you are the office, between four and six, after a full day on the tools.
Winter is dead. Why am I paying in the trough?
Because the trough is when last year’s work is worth money. The quotes that expired unworked, the customers who booked one thing and always meant to do three, the warranties coming up on eleven months, the follow-up work your own techs wrote down and nobody read — that is a winter of interior jobs sitting in a list you already own. It is exactly the work with no urgency attached, which is precisely why it never gets done by hand.
Is this a generic CRM with a handyman sticker on it?
No, and the stage names above are the first test — those are the boards your account opens with, and none of the snapshots being sold for this trade publishes theirs. The second test is what you cannot buy anywhere: we went looking for a handyman build that ships a photo-and-phone quoting lane as its own stage and its own calendar, a minimum that gets stated before somebody drives, an On Hold state that actually pauses the chase, a callback calendar that is deliberately unbilled, and a pre-1978 answer that stops a job instead of pricing it. What is publicly sold is the same niche paragraph with the trade noun swapped, at $97 to $297, and a bundle with a hundred other trades in it. That gap is why this build exists.
Of the next three quotes you are asked for, one needs your eyes. Right now all three get your truck.
Board now and both boards are built, the intake that decides the lane is live, and the fourteen-day chase is running before your next quote goes cold — instead of after.
Automate With Us provides software and configuration services. Figures shown are published industry research, published category 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. Where a home may have been built before 1978, the system flags the job, opens a task and stops: nothing here is guidance on the applicable rule, on any work practice, on testing, or on the handling or disposal of any material, and this software does not make anyone compliant with anything. Licensing, permitting, deposit limits, contract disclosure and messaging requirements are set by states and jurisdictions and vary; this page makes no representation about what you are qualified or licensed to perform, the flag for work needing a licensed trade is set by you, and your account is configured to your own jurisdiction as you confirm it. Warranty terms, service-call minimums, block prices, deposit terms and maintenance-plan prices are yours to set; the system records and times them and does not extend, alter, administer or underwrite any warranty. Price and rate ranges attributed to the trade are what operators and platforms in it publish, not a recommendation of what you should charge. Terms · Privacy