PlumbingBossPro Blog — Quotes & Estimates

Tracking Plumbing Estimates: Knowing Which Quotes Are Open, Approved or Gone Cold

Ask a plumbing owner how much work is sitting in open quotes right now and most will shrug. The quotes are somewhere: in the system, in an email thread, on a carbon pad in the truck. Knowing what is open, what got approved and what has gone cold is the difference between treating quotes as a pipeline and treating them as paperwork.

Quotes Are a Pipeline

Most of the reasons quotes get lost, covered in Why Plumbing Quotes Get Lost, and What to Do About Each Reason, come down to quotes nobody was watching. Tracking is how you watch them.

The idea is simple. Every estimate you send is in one of a few states: waiting on the customer, approved and on its way to the schedule, or not going to happen. Knowing which is which tells you where to spend your time.

Keep Every Estimate in One Place

Tracking only works if every quote is in the same place. If half your quotes are in PlumbingBossPro and half are scribbled on work orders, you are only tracking half. Make it a rule: every quote, even a small repair quoted on the spot, gets built as an estimate in the system.

That pays off beyond tracking. Estimates built from your service list carry your real prices, can be approved online and become the scheduled job when approved. A quote on a carbon pad does none of that. For moving off paper, see Moving Plumbing Estimates Off Carbon Pads and Spreadsheets.

Approved: Already on Its Way

Approved estimates are the easy part. In PlumbingBossPro, an approved estimate becomes the scheduled job. Dispatch assigns it to a van and a day, and it shows up on the tech's phone in route order. You do not need to track approved quotes separately; they are jobs now, and they show up on the Scheduled List and dispatch board like any other job.

The one thing to watch is time from approval to the job. A customer who approved a water heater replacement on Monday expects it soon. If approved jobs sit without a date, that is a dispatch problem worth fixing.

Open: The Ones That Need Attention

Open estimates are where tracking earns its keep. Estimate follow-up emails go out automatically on quotes the customer has not answered, which handles a lot of them. But it is worth a regular look anyway, because some open quotes deserve more than an email.

A simple weekly routine works for most small shops:

• Look at your open estimates. Newest to oldest.
• Flag the big ones. A repipe, a sewer repair or a water heater replacement deserves a personal call or text.
• Flag the urgent ones. If the tech noted something that should not wait, make sure the customer heard that directly.
• Let the small ones ride. The follow-up emails handle routine repairs.

Two-way texting from the office is a good tool here. A short “Any questions on the water heater quote?” text gets a faster reply than most emails.

Gone Cold: When to Let Go

Some quotes will not come back. After a reasonable amount of time and a couple of follow-ups, stop chasing. But do not delete them. A cold estimate is still a record of what you found and what you recommended. When the customer calls back a year later, or when their yearly flush comes due, the quote and findings are there.

The tech's notes and any inspection findings stay on the customer's record too, so the next tech to visit sees what was recommended.

What Your Estimates Tell You

Over a few months, your estimates tell a story about your quoting. Look for patterns:

• Which kinds of quotes get approved most often, and which rarely do?
• Do quotes sent the same day do better than ones sent later?
• Do certain techs' quotes get approved more? What are they doing differently?
• Are option quotes approved at the basic level, the middle or the top?

PlumbingBossPro includes reports, and your own weekly review fills in the rest. You do not need complicated analysis. A few honest observations each month will improve your quoting more than any template.

Who Owns the Pile

In a small shop, open estimates belong to everybody, which means they belong to nobody. Pick one person to own the weekly review. Often it is the owner; sometimes it is whoever runs the office. That person decides which quotes get a call, which get left to the follow-up emails and which are let go. One owner for the pile means nothing falls between two people who each assumed the other was handling it.

Make It a Habit

Tracking estimates is not a big project. It is fifteen minutes a week with a cup of coffee, looking at what is open and deciding what to do about it. The companies that do it consistently tend to find work hiding in their own quote pile. For how tracking fits with the rest of quoting in PlumbingBossPro, see the plumbing estimate software overview.