Where the money leaks
The phone rings while your tech is under a sink. The homeowner emails instead, and the message sits until evening. You send an estimate for a water heater install and never hear back, and nobody remembers to ask. A finished job sits unpaid for a month because the invoice went to an old email address.
None of that is about doing the work badly. It's about the office side: knowing what's open, who owns it, and what happens next. Everything Portal keeps that in one place.
How the portal is set up for home services
Pick the Home services setup from the industry setups and you get:
- Customers and jobs. People are customers, and the work is jobs. Rename them if you say clients or work orders.
- A jobs pipeline with five stages: Lead, Estimate, Scheduled, Done and Paid. Each job is a card with a dollar value, so you can see what's sitting in Estimate at a glance.
- Fields for field work: Service address, Job type and Service area, plus anything you add, such as equipment brand or gate code.
- Booking pages where customers pick a time for an estimate or a maintenance visit themselves, on your own web address if you like.
- A shared inbox where customer email is threaded and filed to the customer. Connect Microsoft 365, Outlook, Gmail or Google Workspace.
- Estimates signed online. Send an estimate or service agreement as a document. The customer types or draws a signature on their phone, and everyone gets a signed copy with a signing certificate.
- Invoices with line items, tax and discount, sent by email or private link. You see when the email is opened and when the invoice is viewed, and the team gets a chat message on the first view. Partial payments and reminders are included.
A day for a plumbing dispatcher
A homeowner fills out the form on your site at 7:40 a.m. The inquiry becomes a customer with lead source Website, the message is kept, and an automation assigns it to the dispatcher and creates a task to call back. She gets a team chat alert right away.
By 10:00 the estimate for a water heater install is out. The job sits in Estimate. If it's still there after three days, the stale deal trigger sends a friendly follow-up email and creates a task for a call on day seven. The plumbing and HVAC guide has timing ideas for estimate follow-up.
Once the work is done, the office sends the invoice. The dispatcher sees the customer viewed it on a phone that evening. A deposit came in earlier, so it's recorded as a partial payment, and a reminder goes out if the balance stays open.
At the end of the week the owner checks the dashboard for revenue by job type and service area, and the monthly goal shows whether the month is on pace.
What's connected, and what's coming
Email connects straight to your Microsoft or Google mailbox, and you can send from your own domain. Website forms post into contacts. Webhooks and an API connect other software with no middleware in between.
Be clear on the rest:
- Field service is coming. Dispatch and a crew app on your techs' phones are on the roadmap. Today the portal works in any phone's browser, but there's no dedicated field app yet.
- Card payments are coming through Stripe. Today customers see your payment instructions on the invoice.
- Business texting is coming. Reminders and follow-ups go by email for now.
- QuickBooks Online isn't built in. We can build a custom connection, and a built-in version is planned.
Switching over
Export your customer list to a spreadsheet, import it, and map the columns to Service address and Service area. Put open estimates in the Estimate stage so follow-up starts right away. Turn on estimate follow-up and new inquiry assignment first, then add more as the team gets used to it.
