Ten Minutes of Paperwork

The admin around a service job — the estimate, the acceptance, the booking, the record and the invoice — should take about ten minutes of human time. Here's how I built it, and how close it is.

When working with small and medium businesses, the administrative overhead of estimating, scheduling and invoicing can sometimes be over half of the job. The work itself usually gets done well, and then someone spends the evening turning it into paperwork: the estimate, the scheduling, the write-up, the invoice. It's the least valuable time in the day, and it's where things go wrong.

So I set a target: the whole admin side of a job should take about ten minutes of a person's time. Here's what that looks like now.

One real job, start to finish: the estimate, the acceptance, the service record, the site record and the invoice page. Customer details redacted.

The scope comes in however it happened. A tech uploads a call transcript, forwards the email thread, or just talks through what the customer wants after walking the site.

The estimate drafts itself from that, and it's priced from real numbers. The conversation is turned into line items, assumptions, exclusions and what the customer needs to provide. Every line is matched to a real item in our catalog, then priced from a stored set of factors: labor rates, mobilization, how much owner oversight the job needs, contingency for unknowns, new construction versus retrofit, pass-through materials, and locked core assumptions. Anything the conversation didn't actually support gets flagged instead of written in.

It goes out as a web page, not an attachment. It's private, branded and expiring, and I get a text when the customer opens it.

The customer accepts it on their phone. They pick an option, type their name, and enter a code texted to them. The exact page they saw is saved with their acceptance, and we both get a signed PDF. It's capped: every option has to be under $2,000. Anything bigger or messier gets a real contract and a real signature, and we're piloting that version now, with full PandaDoc integration and digital signatures.

Then they book the work. Accepting opens a calendar, so scheduling happens in the same motion.

Closing it out takes a few minutes of talking. On a real job, under four minutes of dictation produced the full work summary and invoice. The customer gets a private record of what we did, and any passwords we set live in an encrypted vault, shown only when they press Reveal, and never stored on the page. The invoice arrives on its own page, with a PDF and a pay button, built from the same catalog the estimate used.

How close is it? Scoping to a priced estimate took about nine minutes on a real job. The first job I ran all the way through took about eleven and a half minutes of my time, with a piece of the flow still unfinished. It's finished now, and I expect it under ten.

Ten minutes of paperwork per job means people spend their time doing the work, not documenting it. That's the whole point.