What the office should see before the truck is back

Ask an HVAC office manager when they find out about a sale, and the honest answer at a lot of shops is “when the paperwork comes back.” Sometimes that is the same evening. Sometimes it is a photo of a carbon copy at 8:40 PM. Sometimes it is Monday.

Every hour between the signature and the office is an hour nobody is ordering equipment, scheduling a crew or calling the homeowner to confirm. And every handoff in that gap, from paper to photo to someone’s keyboard, is a chance to get the tonnage wrong.

What the office needs, and when

I spent nine years installing before I moved into onboarding, and I have seen both sides of this. The crew lead on install day needs four things, and the office needs them the moment the homeowner signs:

• The exact equipment, model by model, so it can be ordered from the right branch today.
• The install window the homeowner picked, not “sometime next week.”
• Whether the deposit was collected, and how.
• Anything the tech noticed that the crew should know: a tight attic, a dog, a gate code.

On a Quotient proposal all four are captured before the homeowner taps “sign.” The equipment comes from the option they chose. The last screen asks them to pick an install window. The deposit is taken on the same screen. And the tech’s notes ride along with the job.

Send it where the board already is

We are not trying to replace your dispatch software. Most shops already have a board they like, in Dispatchwell or Trucklog, and the people who run it have strong opinions about it. A signed proposal goes there as a job, with everything above attached, the moment it is signed.

One board, one way of writing a job. That is all I wanted.

That is Devon Kraus, who runs dispatch across Osage Heating & Cooling’s two Columbus locations. Before, Monday mornings at Osage were for typing in Friday’s sales. Now they are for scheduling them. Signature to install at Osage dropped from 4.3 days to 2.7 days, mostly because nothing waits on data entry anymore.

Close rate is an office number too

The other thing the office should see is how the field is doing, without waiting for month-end. On the Shop plan the board shows each tech’s proposals sent, signed and average ticket for the month, plus the open proposals ranked by how recently the homeowner looked at them.

That last list is the one office managers tell us they use most. A proposal the homeowner opened three times yesterday is a phone call worth making today. A proposal nobody has opened in a week needs a different plan.

The notes nobody writes down

The equipment list is the easy part. The thing that actually ruins an install day is the detail the tech noticed and never wrote down: the attic hatch is 20 inches, the breaker panel is in the neighbor’s shared garage, the homeowner works nights and sleeps until noon. On paper those notes live in the tech’s head. On a proposal they are a field, and the crew lead reads them the night before.

We ask techs to write one sentence of notes on every proposal, signed or not. It takes ten seconds at the table. It saves an hour on install day, and it makes the follow-up call sound like someone who was paying attention.

Start with one rule

If you change one thing this month, make it this: no signed job reaches the office as a photo. Whatever system you use, the signed proposal should arrive as data, with the equipment and the date already in it. Everything else gets easier after that.