Growing Your Chimney Business with Chimney Estimating Software

Building an estimate for a customer not only helps your company, it also helps the customer. With an estimate, you can go out onsite, take a look at the customer's fireplace and chimney, investigate what needs done, and then build up an estimate that the customer can mull over, or immediately agree to. Estimates allow you to tell the customer the expected price of the work, allowing them to see on a more detailed level what you've offered them.

The ability to estimate work quickly and accurately allows you to expand your business. If the customer believes they have gotten a good deal on the work, they could even send more business your way via positive word of mouth. They can become a powerful tool to grow your business. Of course, managing, creating, and keeping track of estimates can get very difficult.

Chimney Sweep Estimating Software

Thankfully, we now have technology to digitally create, modify, and keep track of estimates. Chimney sweep software such as Smart Service can record all the estimates you've provided, giving you the ability to convert them into work orders your technicians can execute on a moment's notice.

Smart Service also provides the ability to create the estimates from the field via a mobile app. From there, your technician can build the estimate using items created in Quickbooks. They can add notes and even pictures of what you provided the estimate for. With these capabilities, you won’t have to rely on your technicians emailing you pictures, or bringing in a hard copy of an estimate. When your technicians take their pictures, they will get stored within that estimate record, as will the line items that make up the job, and any PDF’s that you fill out while drafting the estimate.

These PDF’s will come in handy within the chimney industry, as there are times when you draft up an estimate for the customer and they pick and choose only certain parts of that estimate to purchase. If you draft up a quote saying they need their chimney cleaned because of soot build up and they decline and only have you fix the fireplace, you can easily accommodate that request. (In this scenario, you would also have a record that you warned the customer of the soot issue, which will cover your bases should that issue spiral out of control in the future.) After drawing up the quote, your customer can sign off and you can digitally send the final document back to the office. 

From there, office staff have the ability to take that estimate into Smart Service for review. Office workers can access everything that the technician created while out in the field. This includes estimate items, the notes that the technician added, the pictures that the technician added, and any PDF they sent back. Now your office staff can elect to do something differently if needed. If your techs don't build the price of the quote in the field, your office team can do so, then provide that total to the customer.

After the office has either verified what the technician provided or created the price point of the estimate themselves, they have the ability to take that estimate and email it directly to the customer. If they do not have an email, you can also print this out and mail it out to the customer instead. With better estimates, Smart Service can help you grow your business!