Free resource
A trades business loses the most hours in three places: job costing done by hand, claims and supplement paperwork, and the gap between a quote going out and a job getting booked. Everything else is secondary.
The pattern is consistent. The work you get paid for is fine. What bleeds the margin is the paperwork around it, the same information retyped into one more place. These three show up in almost every trades business we look at, in this order.
In this order, because the cost of leaving each one manual is not the same.
Job costing by hand means timesheets and material receipts get reconciled weeks after the job closed. The consequence is specific: you find out a job lost money long after you could have priced it differently. The fix is costing that runs while the job is still open, so a bad job is visible while there is still time to change the price on the next one.
The same photos, measurements and line items get retyped into a carrier form, then retyped again when the carrier pushes back. In a restoration or roofing office this is the single most repetitive task, and it is the one most exposed to a missed deadline. Captured once and mapped to the form, the retyping disappears and the deadline stops being a risk.
A quote goes out and then sits, because following up is a manual job nobody has time for in a busy week. The admin hours here are small, which is why it gets ignored. The revenue quietly lost to whichever competitor called back first is not small, and it does not show up in any report you are currently reading.
Loaded cost of an admin hour is set at $35 in the example below. Change it to your own rate and the arithmetic still holds.
| Workflow | Time it takes | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job costing, done by hand | 3 to 6 hrs/wk | $158 | $7,584 |
| Claims and supplement paperwork | 2 to 5 hrs per open claim | $123 | $5,904 |
| Total annual cost of leaving all three manual | $13,488 | ||
Assumes 48 working weeks. Rows marked in lost jobs or lapsed policies are not included in the total, because those losses are revenue rather than hours and would need your own numbers to price.
We automate a single workflow and prove it. Not a platform, not a transformation programme. One process, working, measured.
A scoped build with a visible finish line. You see it working before you commit to the next one.
No lock-in and no proprietary platform you cannot walk away from. The workflow runs on systems you control, and if you stop working with us it keeps running.
That is the whole guarantee. We pick the workflow with you, we build it, and we measure the hours it saves against the baseline we agreed before we started.
For contractors, restoration firms, roofing, electrical, plumbing and general trades running two or more crews.
Everything on this page fits on a single sheet you can print or forward. We will email it to you, and you can also just download it directly.
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