CRM for Construction

What selling construction work actually looks like

A homeowner fills in a web form about a loft conversion, a facilities manager phones about re-roofing a warehouse, a couple walks into a sales office asking about a two-bedroom unit in a block that will be finished next year. All three have already spoken to somebody else. All three will be quoted by two or three companies, and the quotes will be within ten percent of each other. What decides the job is rarely the number; it is who visited first, who sent the proposal when they said they would, and who called back after it went quiet.

Speed matters even here. The Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies found that responding within an hour made a lead nearly seven times as likely to be qualified than waiting even an hour longer, and that the average response time was 42 hours. A building company is not slower by nature; its estimator is on a roof when the form arrives, and the enquiry waits on a phone until Friday.

The second shape is cost per step. A site visit is half a day; a proposal with drawings is a day or two of an estimator's time. A company that visits everyone and follows up nobody spends its margin on quoting. The pipeline exists to make sure the expensive steps are spent on enquiries that are qualified, and that every proposal is chased until it is won or honestly lost.

The pipeline we recommend starting from

Each stage below is something that verifiably happened. "Thinking about it" is not a stage.

The stage that leaks is proposal sent. Fourteen days of silence on a proposal is not "still deciding"; it is a competitor's site visit. Put the idle alert there before tuning anything else. Kitchen and window installers usually add a "showroom visit" stage before the site visit; commercial contractors add "tender submitted" and "clarifications" between proposal and negotiation. Starter includes two pipelines, Growth five, Business ten — enough for residential, commercial and maintenance as separate processes.

Job and client fields worth having

The lead-detail layout is configurable per role: the office sees contact and site fields, the estimator sees measurements and proposal fields, the owner sees margin. Nobody sees forty inputs at once. Tags handle the things that do not deserve a field — "planning permission pending", "listed building", "access difficult".

Site visits as appointments

A site visit is an appointment with an address, a surveyor and a client, booked from the record or straight from the WhatsApp thread where the homeowner sent the photos. It sends a reminder the evening before — by WhatsApp, SMS or e-mail — and its outcome moves the pipeline. Marking it attended opens the "proposal due" task; marking it no-show opens a rebooking task instead of losing the enquiry.

1. Book from the conversationThe office picks a slot on the surveyor's calendar without leaving the inbox; the record moves to "site visit booked".
2. Remind the clientThe evening before, in the client's language, through the channel they already used; a second reminder two hours before if the surveyor drives far.
3. Record the outcomeAttended, measurements and photos on the record; the proposal task is due in three working days and the estimator sees it on their list.

The shift calendar decides which surveyor is bookable on which days, so a Tuesday visit is not given to someone who is on a site in another city on Tuesdays.

Materials as products: cost, stock, margin

Windows, doors, boilers, tiles and kitchen units are products in the catalogue, each with a sale price, a cost price and whatever custom fields the trade needs — width, height, glazing, colour, supplier code. A deal lists the products in the job. When the deal is won, the stock of each product is deducted and its cost is booked as a cost-of-goods expense automatically, so the margin on the job appears without anyone typing it.

• Suppliers and merchants use the catalogue as a price list: the CSV import updates prices for hundreds of lines in one file, and bulk price changes apply a percentage or a fixed amount across a category.
• Installers keep the twenty units they actually stock and treat everything else as made-to-order with cost but no stock.
• Contractors often model labour as a product with a cost price too, so a "two-person team, one day" line carries its cost into the job's margin.

Product custom fields show as columns on the product list and can be edited in the cell, which is how a small merchant keeps its catalogue current between deliveries.

From won deal to project and tasks

On the Business plan, a won deal can open a project: the client, the site address and the products come across, and a task list follows — survey confirmation, materials order, scaffold, first fix, second fix, snagging, handover. Tasks have owners, due dates and, where the work repeats, a recurrence; a weekly site report is a recurring task, not a reminder somebody sets each Friday.

Projects are where the office and the site meet. The site manager sees today's tasks on the project; the office sees which projects have overdue tasks; the owner sees how many projects are open and which one is quietly late. Flow Boards — an infinite whiteboard on Growth and above — are used by some teams for the site sequence sketch that would otherwise live on a wall.

This is not a scheduling engine. There is no Gantt chart, no resource levelling and no critical path. Companies that need those keep their planning tool and use the project here for the client-facing list of what was promised and whether it is done.

Money per job: income, expenses, profitability

Construction margins are made or lost on the job, not on the year. The finance module records income and expenses; a won deal creates its income, materials create their cost-of-goods expense, and anything else — skip hire, a subcontractor invoice, a parking fine — is entered against the same deal. Deal profitability, on Business, then shows revenue, cost and margin per job and per job type.

Income

Recorded when the deal is won, optionally in instalments as deposits and stage payments arrive; each instalment is an income line with a date.

Cost of goods

Booked automatically from product cost prices when the deal is won; corrected by hand if the supplier's invoice differs.

Job expenses

Everything else spent on that deal, entered with a category and a date, so the margin is real and not the estimator's hope.

Commission

A percentage or a flat amount per salesperson or referrer, calculated when the deal is won and reported by person by month.

None of this replaces accounting. There is no ledger, no VAT return and no bank feed. It answers one question the accounts cannot: which jobs, job types and salespeople actually make money.

Developers selling off-plan

A developer's sales office is a different animal: hundreds of enquiries from ads and portals for a fixed inventory of units, a cycle measured in months, and a hard question — which ad produced reservations, not visits. Units are products with a cost price (land and build cost apportioned) and custom fields: block, floor, orientation, size, view. A reservation is a won deal; the unit's stock goes from one to zero, and the cost of goods sold is booked, so project profitability shows the real margin as the block sells through.

Campaign, ad set and ad are system fields filled by the lead webhook. A pivot report of campaign by stage shows which ads reached "reservation" and which produced only sales-office visits. Country and language are filled from the phone number's country code, which is how a sales office selling to buyers abroad routes German-speaking enquiries to the German-speaking consultant automatically, and why each user has their own display time zone.

A week in a contractor's office

1. Monday — the queueWeekend forms and WhatsApp messages, already assigned by channel distribution; the office calls each one and records budget band and site address.
2. Tuesday–Thursday — visitsSurveyors on booked appointments; reminders went out the evening before; outcomes marked from the phone between sites.
3. Wednesday — proposalsThe "proposal due" tasks from last week's visits; sent from the record, amount recorded, follow-up scheduled.
4. Friday — the idle listProposals with no movement in 14 days surfaced by the automation; the owner or the salesperson calls each.
5. Month end — the numbersEnquiry-to-visit rate, visit-to-proposal, proposal-to-contract, margin by job type. One screen, not a spreadsheet.

Who sees what on a building company?

Office / reception

Inbox, leads, appointments — view and edit, no delete; no cost prices, no finance.

Estimator / surveyor

Own leads plus those assigned by the office; proposal fields and product lines; sees cost prices because the quote depends on them.

Site manager

Projects and tasks only; no pipeline, no finance.

Owner

All scope; finance, profitability, reports, activity log.

Permissions are per module and per action — view, create, edit, delete, export — and data scope is own, department or all. The activity log, from Growth, records who changed a proposal amount, who exported the client list and who reassigned a lead, which is the conversation that happens when an estimator leaves for a competitor.

Numbers the owner should watch

• Enquiry → site visit rate by source — which ads, portals and referrers produce people worth visiting.
• Visit → proposal → contract rates by estimator — the cost of quoting against what it wins.
• Days in "proposal sent" — the leak; when it grows, nobody is calling.
• Margin by job type — the work that fills the calendar is not always the work that pays; with cost prices on products, this is visible without a spreadsheet.
• Response time in working minutes — the form that arrived Saturday and was answered Monday at 09:05 counts as five minutes, not two days, and the report says so.

What this is not

This is not estimating, scheduling or accounting software. It does not take off quantities from drawings, produce Gantt charts, level resources, run payroll, file VAT or connect to a bank. It does not manage BIM models or hold building-regulation documents as a system of record. Keep the planning tool and the accountant; put the enquiry, the visit, the proposal, the chase, the job's margin and the client-facing task list here.

It is also worth saying plainly that automated daily backups of your workspace are not currently part of the service, and that contracts are not signed electronically inside it. Export what you must retain, and attach the signed contract as a file.

When it stops working

Which plan fits?

A two-person renovation firm quoting from the van runs on Starter. An installer with an office, two surveyors and ad-driven enquiries lands on Growth for the idle alerts and the roles. A contractor or developer who wants a project opened on every won deal and margin per job needs Business. See the pricing page, and the products and projects pages for the two modules that carry the load.