Plumbing contractors

How work moves at a plumbing contractor

A plumbing service company starts every job on the phone. A customer calls about a backed-up drain, a leaking water heater, no hot water in a restaurant kitchen, or a slab leak. A customer service rep or dispatcher takes the call, books a window and assigns a plumber. What they write down in those two minutes decides a lot about the rest of the job.

The plumber arrives, diagnoses, often runs a camera or a locator, and prices the work on site, from a price book or by time and material. The customer approves, the work gets done or a return visit gets booked, and the ticket comes back for invoicing. Drain cleaning, water heaters, fixture repair and backflow testing are the daily bread. Excavation, repipes and sewer replacements are bigger jobs that need a quote, a crew and sometimes a permit.

Many plumbing companies also run a new construction or commercial side: underground, rough-in and finish on a builder's schedule. The roles include call takers, a dispatcher, service plumbers from apprentice to master, a warehouse or parts runner, a construction foreman, estimating and a small accounting team.

Where it usually breaks

The call is taken without what the plumber needs

The call taker writes "leak in basement." The plumber arrives without knowing it is a commercial building, which floor, who has access, or that the water heater is a large commercial unit. This is the handoff gap. See quote requests go unanswered in a shared inbox for the same gap on bid work.

Jobs turn into a second trip

The wrong parts on the truck, the wrong size heater, a need for a second plumber or a jetter nobody knew about. A second trip is paid for once and driven twice. That is the exception swamp, where the exceptions are handled by phone and memory. Read jobs need a second trip to finish.

Dispatch runs through one head

One dispatcher knows who can do what, who is near which job, which plumber should never go to which customer. When that person is out or buried, the board falls apart. See dispatch depends on one person, a case of the invisible queue living in someone's head.

Customers call to ask where the plumber is

A window of four hours, a job running long before theirs, and no update. The office spends the afternoon answering "when" calls instead of booking work. See customers call asking when the crew is coming.

The first workflow we usually look at

For a service-heavy plumbing company, it is usually intake through first visit: from the moment the phone rings to the moment the plumber either finishes the job or books a return. It crosses the call taker, the dispatcher, the plumber and the warehouse. The measure is simple. How many jobs are done on the first visit, and for the ones that are not, why not.

We sit with call takers, watch the dispatch board through a busy morning, and ride with plumbers. We follow a batch of recent second trips back to the call that started them. For a construction-heavy shop, the first workflow may be extra work on builder jobs instead. The Spec decides from what it finds.

The systems in the picture

A plumbing contractor usually runs an accounting system and a field service or dispatch app with a price book on the plumbers' phones or tablets. Construction work may add estimating software or a job cost module. Then there is the rest: a whiteboard or spreadsheet for the construction schedule, a shared inbox for commercial bid requests, texts between plumbers and the dispatcher, camera footage on a device, and paper test reports and work authorizations.

A tool we build uses what you already run, so the call record, the ticket and the invoice stay one job, not three.

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec is $15,000, fixed, and it happens on site. We listen to calls, sit next to dispatch, ride along on service calls and talk to the warehouse and the people who build invoices. You get a map of how the workflow runs today, where it breaks, the business case for fixing it, an adoption design that fits how your plumbers and call takers work, and a fixed proposal for the Build. If the Spec shows the fix is not worth building, it says so.