The operations team was running a $4M business on six spreadsheets. We fixed that.
A home services business was tracking jobs, crews, inventory, invoices, and customer communications across six spreadsheets and a shared inbox. The spreadsheets worked when the business did 200 jobs a year. At 800 jobs a year, they were creating one error per day. A custom operations platform replaced all six.
A growing home services business was producing one operational error per day from spreadsheet-based job management — wrong crew assignments, double-booked jobs, missed follow-ups — and each error cost $200–$800 to resolve.
The business had grown from 200 to 800 jobs per year in 3 years. The operational infrastructure hadn't scaled with the revenue. At 200 jobs/year, a single operations manager with the right spreadsheets could manage everything. At 800 jobs/year, with 4 crews and 2 operations staff, the spreadsheets were generating errors faster than they could be fixed.
The six spreadsheets:
- Job intake — customer name, address, job type, requested date, and notes from the booking call
- Scheduling — crew assignments, job dates, and the time estimates that were only visible to whoever built the schedule
- Inventory — equipment and materials allocated to each job, updated manually after each job
- Invoice tracking — QuickBooks invoice numbers linked to jobs, payment status updated manually
- Customer follow-up — post-job follow-up dates and notes, managed in the same spreadsheet as the intake log
- Crew hours — hours logged per job per crew member, used for payroll calculation
The error rate: one significant error per day on average. Wrong crew assignment to a job they didn't have the equipment for ($400 in equipment rental and a re-schedule). Double-booked crews ($200 in customer rebooking credits). Missed invoice follow-ups on past-due invoices ($600 in delayed revenue per missed follow-up on average).
A single operational platform replacing six spreadsheets — job management, crew scheduling, inventory tracking, invoicing, and customer communications — with the error rate reduced to near zero.
Job management
Job creation from the booking call (customer details, address, job type, scheduled date, assigned crew, required equipment). Job status workflow: scheduled → in-progress → completed → invoiced → paid. Full job history and notes.
Crew scheduling
Calendar view with crew-based filtering. Conflict detection — the system prevents double-booking a crew. Equipment allocation per job with inventory availability checking.
Inventory tracking
Equipment inventory with assignment to jobs. Return tracking after job completion. Low-stock alerts for consumable materials.
QuickBooks integration
Automatic QuickBooks invoice creation when a job is marked completed. Invoice status sync from QuickBooks back to the job record. Past-due invoice flagging in the job view.
Customer communications
Automated post-job follow-up emails triggered 3 days after job completion. Review request emails. Customer portal for service history and upcoming appointment tracking.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A single operational platform replacing six spreadsheets — job management, crew scheduling, inventory tracking, invoicing, and customer communications — with the error rate reduced to near zero.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
The business owner needed to know the total investment before committing. The ROI case ($1,000/day in error costs eliminated) was clear; the budget had to match it.
Related engagements.
Your team is running a business process on a spreadsheet. That breaks at scale — every time.
Read more02Your operations team is working around your internal tools instead of with them.
Read more03Spreadsheets are the universal business process tool. They're also the first sign of a process that needs software.
Read moreQuestions, answered.
The cutover was scheduled for a low-volume week (a public holiday weekend) and took a full business day. The data migration from 6 spreadsheets to the new database took 3 days of preparation and 4 hours of execution. The operations team was trained on the new system in a 2-hour session. By end of week 1, the spreadsheets were archived.
The two operations staff were involved in the specification process — they reviewed the spec before development started and provided feedback on the workflow designs. By the time the application was ready, they had been part of its design. Resistance was minimal.
At 3 months post-launch: zero double-booking errors, zero wrong-crew-assignment errors, invoice follow-up automation recovered $8,400 in previously delayed payments, and the operations manager reduced overtime hours by 6 hours/week.
$38,000 for the full operations platform with QuickBooks integration and customer communications. 11 weeks.
The operations platform scaled to 1,200 jobs/year in the first 12 months without adding operations headcount. A second engagement 8 months after launch added a mobile app for the field crews — job checklists, progress photos, and real-time status updates without phone calls back to the office.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.