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For builders and construction firms
Priced at midnight, chased at seven, paid whenever.
Enquiries answered while your hands are full, quotes out the same day, and site paperwork that files itself.
Building is a trade where the admin arrives after the work, and the work already takes the whole day. You are in a loft, on a scaffold or halfway through a pour when the phone goes, and the person ringing is ringing three builders. By the time you climb down and listen to the voicemail, someone else has been booked in for a look.
Then the evening starts. Prices to check with the merchant, a quote to type up, an extra to explain, an invoice to raise and last month's invoice still not chased. None of it is the part you are good at and none of it is the part you get paid for, but between them they decide whether the work you did turns into money in the account.
None of this needs a big system or a change to how you build. It needs the phone covered when both hands are full, a way to price a job on a phone in ten minutes, and somewhere for the photos, warrants and delivery notes to land without anyone filing them. That is the whole of what we set up for firms your size.
Sound familiar?
- Enquiries land while everyone is on site, so by the evening the customer has already booked whoever picked up
- Pricing a job means another night at the kitchen table with a pad, a merchant price list and a calculator
- Extras agreed on site with a nod, then argued about when the invoice arrives
- Drawings, certificates, delivery notes and site photos spread across three phones and a van glovebox
What we do about it
- Missed calls answer themselves with a text asking what the job is and where, so the enquiry is still alive in the morning
- Quotes built on your phone from your own rates and common job templates, sent before you leave the drive
- Extras logged on the spot with a photo and an approval from the customer, agreed before the work is done
- One place per job where photos, documents and delivery notes land as they arrive, searchable by address years later
A day that probably looks like yours
Nothing here is a disaster. That is rather the point: this is an ordinary day, and the cost is spread so thinly that nobody ever adds it up.
- 07:10First enquiry of the day arrives while the team is loading the van.Straight to voicemail, and they ring the next builder on the list.
- 09:40The customer asks for an extra socket and a wider opening. Everyone nods and carries on.Nothing written down, so the extra becomes a disagreement six weeks later.
- 11:20The merchant queries a delivery that came up short. Nobody can find the note.Half an hour on the phone and a charge that may never be credited.
- 14:00A homeowner wants a price for a loft conversion by Friday.Another evening lost to pricing rather than to your family.
- 17:30Site photos, a building warrant and a skip receipt sit in someone's camera roll.All of it will be wanted in a year, and nobody will know whose phone it was on.
- 21:15Quote typed, invoice raised, and last month's unpaid invoice still not chased.Your money sitting in somebody else's bank account for another month.
Answering the enquiry when both hands are full
The hardest thing about winning building work is that the enquiry almost never arrives at a convenient moment. It arrives when you are up a ladder, under a floor or in the middle of a conversation with a customer you are already working for. Voicemail feels like a safety net, but most people ringing about building work do not leave one. They ring the next number.
The fix is not a receptionist you cannot justify. A business number that rings the office and every mobile at once, then sends an automatic text when nobody picks up, keeps most of those enquiries warm. The text asks two questions that matter: what the job is and where it is. By the time you are back in the van you know whether it is worth ringing back tonight or tomorrow.
For firms doing enough volume that the phone becomes a real distraction, a live answering service is often cheaper than the work it saves. Someone picks up in your business name, takes the details, and you get a message rather than an interruption. Either way, the point is the same: the call stops being a coin toss.
Pricing without giving up your evenings
Most building firms price the same handful of job types over and over, with the same rates, the same rough labour assumptions and the same suppliers. That repetition is exactly what software is good at. Build your rates in once, set up templates for the jobs you do most, and a quote becomes a matter of picking the parts and adjusting for the site rather than starting from a blank page every time.
Speed matters more than polish here. On domestic work, the builder who gets a clear price back first is very often the one who wins it, not because they were cheapest but because they seemed organised and interested. Being able to send something proper from the van the same afternoon is worth more than a beautiful document that arrives ten days later.
It also fixes the quiet leak of quotes that were sent and never followed up. When every quote sits in one list with a date against it, a simple reminder goes out a week later asking whether they had any questions. That single message wins back work that was never actually lost, it was just forgotten by both sides.
Extras, photos and the arguments they prevent
Almost every dispute on a domestic build comes down to the same thing. Someone asked for something extra, it was agreed verbally on a wet Tuesday, and by the time it appears on the final bill the two sides remember the conversation differently. Nobody is lying. It just was never written down.
Recording an extra takes about a minute if the tool is on the phone you already carry. Describe it, photograph it, note the price, and send it to the customer to approve there and then. Once that is normal, the final invoice contains no surprises, and the conversation you were dreading does not happen. Customers generally prefer it too, because they can see what they are agreeing to.
The same applies to everything else the job generates. Before and after photos, dated site progress shots, building warrant paperwork, certificates from the electrician and the gas engineer, delivery notes, skip receipts. If those land against the job as they happen, then in three years, when a house is being sold and a solicitor asks for the paperwork, you find it by typing the address.
Getting paid without the awkward phone call
Chasing money is the job nobody wants and the one that decides whether a good year is actually a good year. Most late payment is not refusal, it is drift. The invoice sat in an inbox, the customer meant to pay it, and nobody reminded them because reminding people feels rude when you have to do it yourself.
Automated reminders remove the awkwardness entirely. A polite note goes out at seven days, another at fourteen, another at thirty, in your name and your tone, and it goes out whether or not you remembered. Most invoices clear on the first or second nudge. You only get involved in the few that genuinely need a conversation.
Stage payments help just as much on larger jobs. Agreeing and invoicing at defined points, with the paperwork already attached, means the cash arrives while the work is still moving rather than all at the end, and you are not funding someone else's extension out of your own working capital.
Real examples
Illustrative cases drawn from the kind of work we do. Tap one to see what happened and what could have been done. We do not name clients without their permission.
The enquiries that were never lost on price
The case
A domestic builder assumed he was losing work because his prices were too high, so he sharpened them and won no more jobs than before. What was actually happening was that around half of new enquiries came in during working hours, went to voicemail, and were never returned because the caller had already booked someone else by the evening.
What could have been done
Putting the number on a system that rings every mobile at once and sends an automatic text when nobody answers turns those silent voicemails into short conversations. The prices go back up to where they were, and the diary fills from calls he had already paid to generate.
The extras nobody wrote down
The case
A firm finished a large extension having agreed a string of small changes on site over four months. The final invoice was several thousand pounds above the original quote, all of it legitimate, and none of it in writing. The customer paid the original figure only, and the relationship ended badly.
What could have been done
Logging each change on the phone as it is agreed, with a photo and a price the customer approves from their own phone, means the final invoice contains nothing the customer has not already seen and accepted. The awkward conversation happens in one minute rather than at the end for thousands.
The paperwork nobody could find
The case
Three years after a conversion, a homeowner's solicitor asked the builder for the completion certificates and sign off paperwork during a sale. The documents existed somewhere, but between a changed phone, a former employee and an old email account, it took the best part of a week to reassemble them.
What could have been done
Filing documents and photos against the job address as they arrive means the whole history of a property is one search away, years later, from anyone in the office. It also quietly protects the firm, because the record of what was actually done still exists.
What builders and construction firms usually ask us for
VoIP and cloud telephony
Business phone systems that follow your team anywhere. Number porting, call routing, voicemail to email, and call recording where you need it.
£18 to £35/user/month
Call answering and reception
Your calls answered in your company name, triaged, and passed on properly. Nothing goes to voicemail.
£300 to £800/month
Custom CRM and business systems
The system you actually need rather than the one you can rent. Built around your process, integrated with what you already use.
£20,000 to £40,000
Website design and build
Fast, accessible sites that load in under two seconds and read well on a phone. Built to be edited by you, not held hostage by us.
£4,000 to £8,000
Local SEO and Google Business
Get found by the people down the road who are ready to buy. We fix your Google Business Profile, get your Name, Address and Phone matching everywhere, and win the map pack that sits above the normal results.
£500 to £1,200/month
Common questions
We are only a small firm. Is this not aimed at bigger contractors?
No. Most of what we set up for builders is aimed at firms of two to fifteen people, because that is where the owner is still doing the pricing, the chasing and the filing personally. Large contractors already have back office staff for it. The smaller you are, the more of your own time this gives back.
Do the lads on site have to learn new software?
As little as possible. In practice the site side of it is usually taking a photo, adding a line of text and tapping approve, on the phone they already carry. If it needs training, it is the wrong tool for a building site. The office side has more to it, but that is one or two people rather than everyone.
Will we lose our phone number if we change telephone system?
No. Numbers are portable, including old landline numbers that have been on your vans and adverts for twenty years. Moving it is a routine process and we handle it. The number is usually the single most valuable thing a building firm owns, so we treat the move as the careful part of the job.
We already use accounting software. Does this replace it?
Usually not. Your accounts package is generally fine at being an accounts package. The gap is everything before the invoice: the enquiry, the quote, the job, the extras and the photos. We connect the two so the invoice comes out of the job rather than being typed again, and leave your accountant with the system they know.
How quickly would we see any difference?
The phone side is usually the fastest, because missed call handling can be live within days and you notice it the first week. Quoting takes longer, because your rates and templates have to go in properly to be worth anything. We would rather do the fast, cheap thing first and let it pay for the rest.
Not quite your trade?
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Admin Rescue for builders and construction firms
A job management system built around how you actually work. Missed calls text back automatically, quotes go out in minutes, and everything lands in your accounts software without you retyping it.
from £2,400 setup then £150/month