The 11pm burst pipe you don't answer is the job somebody else gets.
A homeowner with water on the floor calls plumbers in the order Google lists them and stops at the first one who picks up. Published trade data says more than half the calls into a plumbing company never become a job — and the smaller the shop, the worse the number. You are under a sink, or asleep.
Most software helps you chase leads. We build the emergency lane: an instant text on every missed call, day or night, that asks the three safety questions a real dispatcher asks, states your after-hours rate before the truck rolls, and books the slot — on the same machine that runs your Tuesday drain calls, your permit-gated repipes and the membership visits you're owed.
The house is the customer. The water heater has a birthday.
A tank water heater lasts roughly 8 to 12 years — manufacturers and home inspectors publish the same range. So the serial number your tech reads off a unit during a routine repair decodes to an install date, and the install date becomes a campaign that fires by itself at year 8, year 10 and year 12. A generic CRM models a customer with a job history. This one models a house with dated assets — and the assets come due.
Illustrative example. Ages are relative to 2026; the 8–12 year tank life is manufacturer and inspector data, not a prediction for any unit. Your register fills from the serials your techs capture on every water-heater job, including repairs — the tags shown are the ones your account ships with.
Serial capture is a completion step
Every water-heater job, including repairs, ends with the serial, type and install date on the property record. Where the date is unknown, the serial decodes it. Homes change hands; the water heater doesn't — so the record lives on the house.
Pipe material is a standing lead, not history
Polybutylene or galvanized supply on the record is an open repipe conversation. A clay or Orangeburg lateral with a root-intrusion history is recurring sewer work, and the camera footage from the last visit rides on the next proposal.
The register runs on due dates, never a drip
Backflow retests, membership visits owed, water-treatment consumables, warranty expiries — each is an obligation with a date. It drops onto the dispatch board ahead of time instead of living in a nurture sequence that cannot represent an obligation.
We didn't guess at your business.
This kit was designed against how plumbing companies really operate — a demand lane measured in hours and a project lane measured in weeks, running in the same company on the same day, with a safety question in front of both.
Two clocks, one company, same day.
A burst pipe is sold and completed on one visit — the close happens standing in the customer's utility room. A repipe or sewer lateral is quoted, considered, financed and permit-gated over weeks. A demand job that sits four days in a stage is a lost customer; a project that sits four days is normal. Same stage name, opposite meaning — so they get separate boards.
The first question isn't “when can you come.” It's “is water still flowing?”
Every real dispatcher script opens with three questions: is water actively flowing, is the main shut-off closed, is there a smell of gas. The answers decide the truck, the tech, the rate and whether this is a booking at all. The intake asks them before anyone drives anywhere — and records that the shut-off instruction was given.
Options presented is not options sold.
The money stage in this trade is Diagnosed & Options Presented — where a drain call becomes a sewer replacement. The truck is already there, so nothing upstream is the problem. A customer who takes the diagnosis and shops it isn't lost; they're a priced, diagnosed, in-home lead, and almost nobody works that list.
Collecting for the visit and never scheduling it.
Service memberships are the annuity in plumbing, and the chronic industry failure is selling the plan, taking the money, and never putting the visit owed on the schedule. A membership is an obligation with a date, and the board should treat it like one.
Two boards, with the stage names this trade actually uses.
Not a blank CRM you have to design. These are the boards your account opens with — the cyan marker is the safety gate nothing skips, the gold one is where the money is decided.
Plumbing Service Calls
Hours — sold and completed on the visit- Call Received / Safety Triage
- Booked
- Dispatched / En Route
- On Site
- Diagnosed & Options Presented
- Approved
- Completed
- Invoiced
- Paid
- Membership Offered
Plumbing Projects
Weeks — permit-gated, financing attached- Project Lead
- Site Assessment / Camera Scope
- Options Built
- Proposal Presented
- Follow-Up
- Sold / Deposit Taken
- Permit Applied
- Permit Issued
- Scheduled
- Rough-In
- Rough Inspection Passed
- Final / Trim
- Final Inspection Passed
- Completed
- Final Payment
- Warranty Registered
Commercial / Property Accounts
Weeks to months — the stabilizer- Target Identified
- First Contact / Walkthrough
- Rate Sheet + Terms Proposed
- Trial Work Order
- Account Signed
- Active
- Dormant
Property managers, restaurants, HOAs and general contractors route here, never into the homeowner drip. A property manager who receives a homeowner nurture sequence is a lost account. Dormant means no work order in a couple of months — and a re-visit task, not a broadcast.
What the permit gates actually hold
Two stages on the project board belong to the city, not to you. Permit Applied can sit one to two weeks with nothing you can do about it — so the customer-facing follow-up goes silent there and the tasks point at the permit office instead. A nurture text firing while the city sits on a permit reads as incompetence.
- Permit Issued before anything gets scheduled — booking a repipe start before the permit lands is the common failure that produces an idle crew and an angry customer
- Completed is not the end of a permitted job; Final Inspection Passed is — and the compliance certificate on a sewer lateral is stored on the property for the resale call years later
- A like-for-like water-heater swap is permit-exempt in many places; a relocation, fuel change or venting rework is not — so “permit required” is a branch on the intake answers, not a blanket rule
- A failed inspection is a real state with its own correction-and-reinspect loop
Five booking types, and they are not interchangeable.
Merge them and the wrong fee gets quoted on the phone, or a repipe gets a start date before the permit exists. These are the calendars your account opens with, by name.
Held-back capacity, not a bookable slot in the consumer sense. The operator practice is two or three emergency slots per plumber per day, so a burst pipe doesn't detonate the schedule. The triage answers drive routing and the after-hours rate.
A window, not a time — two hours is the residential norm. Confirmation, a day-before reminder, then the on-my-way text with the tech's name and photo.
Repipe, sewer and water-heater replacement assessments. Kept separate because most shops charge no diagnostic fee on a replacement estimate but do on a repair — one merged calendar quotes the wrong fee.
The multi-hour block for replacement and repipe work, schedulable only once Permit Issued is on the card.
The visit owed under a service plan. Generated from the due date and dropped onto the board ahead of time — the visit the industry collects for and forgets.
The follow-up you keep meaning to build.
Every one of these ships switched on and named for plumbing. None of them is a template you have to find, wire up and remember to turn on — and the ones that matter most are the ones that know when not to send.
An instant answer, then the three safety questions
Web form, chat widget, Google Business Profile, Local Services Ads, referrals and missed calls each get their own intake — a text out in seconds that offers a booking, not a callback. The emergency path asks the three questions first and skips the nurture entirely; a referral names the referrer and drops the generic offer; a property manager routes to the accounts board.
Missed-call text-back, day and night
The caller gets a text immediately and the office gets a notification. Outside your office hours the after-hours version answers, carries the reply-1-for-emergency-dispatch route, and states your after-hours rate — so an emergency caller learns the premium before the truck rolls, not on the invoice.
The gas branch stops the machine
If a caller reports a gas smell, the automation stops booking. It tells them to leave the building, call the gas utility from outside, and not touch switches or phones indoors — then it escalates to a human. No AI assistant handles that path alone. It is a safety rail, not a routing preference.
Arrival windows, on-my-way, no-show recovery
Confirmations and reminders speak in windows, not fixed times. The on-my-way text carries the tech's name and photo and what the customer needs to do — clear the path to the water heater, unlock the crawlspace. A no-show gets a recovery sequence instead of a shrug.
Follow-up on options presented and declined
When a customer takes the diagnosis home to think, a follow-up sequence opens with the reason coded on the card — price, second opinion, landlord decision, financing. Above your project threshold it hands off to the project lane; below it, a long-tail touch keeps the priced, diagnosed lead warm.
Project proposals with three options, footage attached
Every project proposal ships good, better and best by construction — a single-price proposal is treated as a process defect. The camera footage rides with it, because a lateral quote with footage reads like a diagnosis and one without reads like a cold pitch. Quotes carry a visible 30-day validity, and the financing offer is a stage of its own.
Won, then job prep, then silence where silence is right
Parts, permit determination and access get their tasks the moment a project is sold. Then, in the permit waiting state, the customer gets a status note and nothing else — while the follow-up tasks aim at the permit office.
Inspection close-out that survives the job
Rough and final inspections are stages with dates. Final Inspection Passed closes the permitted job, the warranty terms and expiry are stamped on it, and the compliance certificate lives on the property record for the homeowner who calls about it at resale.
A review request that knows when not to fire
The review ask goes out by text within a couple of hours of the fixture working, routed so happy customers land on Google and unhappy ones land on you. It does not fire on a home-warranty dispatch, a tenant-authorized call, an open callback or a failed inspection. The operator's version of this trade is defined by what it does not send.
Membership offered at completion, by the tech
The plan is pitched on the job while the fixture works, not by email a week later. Then the day-30 referral ask, and the visit owed lands on the register with a due date.
The reactivation engine
Water-heater age campaigns at years 8, 10 and 12. Repipe conversations off polybutylene and galvanized supply. Root-recurrence touches off the lateral history. Backflow test-due reminders. Membership renewal at 90, 60 and 30 days out, and failed-card dunning that treats a declined card as the churn event it is. Seasonal broadcasts on the trade's own calendar — the pre-freeze push, and the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Compliance rails, on from day one
STOP and HELP handling, do-not-contact honored across every sequence, consent capture and broadcast caps. Plus the trade's own two: home-warranty and tenant jobs are suppressed from every upsell touch, and your license number rides on every estimate and every ad, because several states require it.
A service call is one payday. A membership is a book.
Published plumbing plans sit around ~$8 to $18 a month, and the benefit set is remarkably consistent across operators: an annual whole-home inspection, a water-heater flush, priority scheduling, a waived diagnostic fee, no after-hours surcharge, and a discount on parts and labor. It is also why the emergency lane and the annuity are one system — when a member calls at 11pm, the after-hours quote already knows they're a member.
The plan converts on the job while the fixture works — not from an email later. The completion step puts it in the tech's hands, at the plan name and price your account was configured with.
Every plan writes its visits to the register with due dates. They drop onto the dispatch board ahead of time and cluster geographically — the industry's chronic failure is collecting and never scheduling.
Renewal is flagged three times before it lands and autopay runs the billing. Published benchmarks put manual, untracked renewal in the ~60s and a scheduled pre-expiry sequence into the ~mid-80s — the one automation in this trade with a measured, published lift.
A declined card is chased the day it fails, by text with a re-capture link. Dunning is the retention program — and the member who lapses quietly is the one who calls a competitor at 11pm.
More than half the calls into a plumbing shop never become a job.
Not for lack of demand. The phone rings and nobody books it — and the smaller the shop, the worse the number. Speed and coverage on the first response is the advantage in this trade that costs nothing to hold and almost nobody holds.
Plumbing's call-booking rate in a 3,000-business trade study — the highest of any trade, which still means ~57% of inbound calls never turn into a job.
Booking rate at shops with fewer than five techs, against ~59% at shops with more than twenty-five. The gap is phone coverage and process, not demand.
More likely to qualify a lead when the first contact happens inside the first hour, across ~1.25 million leads studied by Harvard Business Review.
Of contractors respond to an inbound inquiry within five minutes. The other ~88% are the reason a text sent in seconds wins the 11pm job.
Figures are published industry research, shown to illustrate where the opportunity sits — they are not a projection of your results. Call-booking rates come from a 2022 multi-trade study of more than 3,000 businesses, reported for plumbing; the response-time studies are cross-industry and directionally relevant to home services rather than native to it. Membership and renewal figures are trade-published ranges; yours will differ.
Your first thirty days.
Configuration is ours, not yours. Here's the sequence — and the one point where we need something only you can give us.
-
Days 1–3
Your account is built, not handed to you blank
All three boards, and the fields this trade actually needs — job type, urgency, the three triage checkboxes, who pays (homeowner, home warranty, tenant, landlord, insurance, commercial) with the warranty authorization number, water-heater serial, install date and type, supply-pipe and sewer-lateral material, root-intrusion history, static pressure and PRV, permit number and jurisdiction, backflow device and test-due date, membership plan, expiry and visits owed.
-
Days 3–7
Lead capture and triage go live
An emergency request form carrying the three safety questions so routing branches at intake, a service request form, a project and estimate form, the chat widget and your Google Business Profile — all wired to the boards. Missed-call text-back on, with its after-hours variant. Every source tagged so you can see which ones produce.
-
Week 2
The things we need from you
Text-message registration and your sending domain both require a real human with your business details — regulation, not paperwork we invented. We prepare the submissions; you approve and sign, and that sets your go-live date. Alongside it, the numbers your texts will quote: your license number, diagnostic fee, after-hours rate, and your membership plan's name and monthly price.
-
Week 3
Payments connected
Your Square account and dual-priced invoicing go live: text-to-pay from the truck at Approved, the project deposit invoice computed at your deposit percentage of the quoted amount, e-signed proposals with three options, and the membership plan set up as recurring billing on autopay.
-
Week 4
The register is armed
Water-heater age campaigns off install dates, repipe leads off pipe material, backflow test-due reminders, membership visits owed and the 90/60/30 renewal sequence, plus the seasonal broadcasts — winterization before the first freeze, the day-after-Thanksgiving push, the summer root-intrusion season — all scheduled, then running whether or not anyone remembers them.
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 — and in the demand lane the invoice happens in the utility room. 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.
Approved, invoiced, paid — before the truck leaves
The options were presented on a phone in the customer's kitchen. Approved fires the invoice into the same text thread the triage ran in, with a pay link. Your customer isn't at a counter; the thread is the counter.
The project deposit computes itself
Sold / Deposit Taken fires a deposit invoice at your deposit percentage of the quoted amount — 50% by default, yours to change — before a permit is pulled or a part is ordered. A deposit schedule on the card overrides the default when a job needs one.
Membership on autopay, chased when a card fails
The plan bills itself monthly or annually, and a declined card is chased by text with a re-capture link the day it fails. Auto-renew retains materially better than manual renewal in the published data; this is the mechanism.
Dual pricing on volume you already run
Emergency tickets, deposits, completion balances and plan autopay add up to steady card volume at ~3% in processing. Dual pricing hands that cost back. Your property-management accounts paying net 30 by check and your home-warranty checks notice nothing — they already pay the cash price.
Two plans. Month to month.
Everything above is included in both — all three boards, the emergency lane, the register, 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
- Five calendars and online booking
- Website and funnels
- Forms and surveys — the emergency intake with the three safety questions
- AI lead follow-up
- Payments and invoicing
- Everything in Starter
- Full marketing suite
- Reputation management — the review request with its suppression list
- Social planner
- Memberships — the service plan on autopay
- Documents and contracts — e-signed proposals with good, better, best
- Advanced reporting
- Priority support
Fair questions.
Half my calls are home-warranty dispatches. A five-star request on those would be a disaster.
Agreed, and the system knows it. A job tagged home warranty never enters the review, upsell or membership path — the customer's frustration is with the warranty company's rates and turnaround, not with you, and the job gates on the authorization number before work proceeds. Same for tenant-authorized calls where the landlord pays. Suppression is the whole point of those tags.
My customer is standing in an inch of water. They are not reading a text menu.
The text-back is for the calls you didn't answer — the alternative is voicemail and the next plumber on the list. Reply 1 dispatches tonight. The three questions are the same three a good dispatcher asks, and they put the right tech and the right parts in the truck. A gas smell ends the automation and puts a human on it.
I already run ServiceTitan. I'm not ripping out my dispatch board and price book.
Don't. Your field-service software stays the source of truth for dispatch, routing, the flat-rate price book and job costing — that's the documented best-practice split in this trade. What moves is the marketing, the follow-up, the property register and the money.
Dual pricing on an emergency invoice sounds like an argument at 11pm.
The argument happens when the price is a surprise, and here nothing is. The after-hours rate is stated in the first text. The cash price is the price; the card price is derived from it and shown beside it, and the customer chooses — every time. Your home-warranty companies and property managers pay by check and never see the card price at all.
Is this just a generic CRM with a plumbing sticker on it?
No, and the stage names above are the first test — they are the boards your account actually opens with. The second test is what you can't buy elsewhere: we went looking for a plumbing snapshot that ships a safety triage gate, a property record with dated assets, a permit waiting-state and a review suppression list. The published ones stop at a marketing pipeline. That gap is why this build exists.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest plumbing day of the year.
Board now and every call that day gets an answer — including the ones you miss.
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, 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. Safety guidance shown in examples is illustrative and does not replace your own dispatch procedures; a suspected gas leak should always be reported to the gas utility or emergency services first. Terms · Privacy