What a contractor's CRM has to model that generic software does not
A sales CRM models a deal moving toward a signature. A contractor's job carries on for weeks after the signature, and that is where the money is decided.
The short answer
A contractor's system has to model things generic CRM has no field for: licence and insurance expiry dates, a certificate of insurance per job and per general contractor, permit numbers and inspection dates, crew assigned by day and by skill, and money released in stages against completed work. Without those objects, the facts live in a spreadsheet beside the CRM and get retyped by hand.
SHT-02What drives the number
A deal ends at signature. A job starts there.
Generic CRM is built around a pipeline: a contact becomes an opportunity, moves through stages, and closes. That model is correct for software sales and wrong for construction, because closing is roughly the midpoint. After the signature there is a site with an address that is not the customer's billing address, a schedule that collides with three other jobs, materials that have to be on site the day before rather than the day of, inspections that are not under your control, and payments that arrive in pieces. Trying to hold that in a pipeline produces the familiar shape: the CRM holds the customer, a spreadsheet holds the job, a calendar holds the crew, and the accounting package holds the money, with a person retyping between all four. Every retyped number is a wage and an error.
Compliance is a set of dated documents, not a checkbox
A contractor's licence has a number, a jurisdiction and an expiry date. General liability and workers compensation have policy numbers, carriers and expiry dates. A certificate of insurance is issued for a specific job, naming a specific party as additional insured, and it expires while the job is still running. Subcontractors have their own versions of all of this, plus a W-9. None of these are fields in a sales CRM, so they end up in a folder, and the folder does not warn anybody. What the system has to do is hold the document, hold the date, and raise its hand before the date rather than after, because an expired COI does not fail loudly, it fails at the gate on the morning your crew is standing there. Scheduled jobs are the right mechanism for this; the same pattern runs 13 scheduled jobs in one of the systems in production, precisely because the parts of the week that depend on someone remembering are the parts that stop happening in a busy month.
Permits and inspections are a calendar you do not control
A permit has a number, an issuing jurisdiction, an application date, an issue date and an expiry. An inspection has a type, a scheduled date, an inspector, an outcome, and often a re-inspection with its own date. Work that depends on a passed inspection cannot be scheduled before it, and a failed inspection has to push everything downstream without anyone rebuilding the schedule by hand. Generic software has no representation of any of this, which means the true state of a job lives in the project manager's memory and in a text thread. The system's job is to make the dependency explicit: this task cannot start until that inspection passes, and when it fails, here is what moved.
Crews are scheduled by day, by skill, and by who is allowed to see what
Assigning a job to a salesperson is a single field. Assigning a crew is a different shape: several people, on specific days, with a skill requirement, without double-booking anyone, and with an installer who should see their own jobs and not the whole board or the margin on any of them. Pay follows from the same records, and it has to follow under one rule rather than three that disagree, or the payroll number and the job cost number will drift apart quietly. The interface matters as much as the model. In one system the crew moves work forward by tapping a button in Telegram, and it refuses free text and voice notes on purpose, because one misheard word would move a real job. Only the legal next step is offered, and installers can move work but not documents.
Money arrives in pieces, and the arithmetic has to be exact
A contractor is not paid once. There is a deposit, then draws against progress, sometimes retainage held until completion, and change orders that alter the contract value mid-job and have to be signed. Invoicing against completed work means the system has to know what is complete, which is why the schedule and the billing cannot be separate tools. The document side has to match: an estimate the customer opens on their phone and signs, composited into a real PDF with both names, the date, and an audit trail recording IP and user agent, branded as the contractor's rather than the builder's. On the payment side, deposits by card and bank transfer built on Stripe Connect land in the contractor's own account, with the platform fee taken out of the payout rather than added to the homeowner's total, and fees computed in whole cents. Bank transfer is offered because on a large deposit the card fee is the difference between a few dollars and a few hundred.
SHT-03The options, side by side
What each route actually costs you.
| Option | Price | Timeline | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generic sales CRM | Per seat, per month | Same day | Good at contacts and a pipeline. No permit, inspection, COI, crew-day or draw schedule, so the job itself lives in a spreadsheet beside it. |
| Field service or trades product | Per seat, per month | Days to weeks | Models jobs, crews and invoices properly, and is often the right answer. Your pricing method has to fit theirs, and the compliance detail your jurisdiction demands may simply not exist. |
| Spreadsheets plus accounting software | Low, in software | Already running | Flexible and free of licence fees. The cost is a person retyping between four places and a compliance date nobody is warned about until the gate. |
| Custom build | From $2,000 | 30-45 days | Permits, COIs, inspections, crew days and draws modelled as real objects with dates that raise their hand. Only worth it when the trade detail is what generic software keeps getting wrong. |
SHT-04General notes
The questions people actually ask.
- N01Why does a contractor need a different CRM?
- Because a sales CRM ends at the signature and a construction job starts there. Licence and insurance expiry, a certificate of insurance per job, permit numbers, inspection dates, crew assigned by day and skill, and money released in stages have no fields in a generic product, so they end up in spreadsheets and folders that do not warn anyone.
- N02Can I not just add custom fields to an off-the-shelf CRM?
- Sometimes, and try it first. Custom fields store a date; they rarely enforce a rule. What you usually cannot add is behaviour: a task that will not start until an inspection passes, a schedule that reflows when one fails, or an alert that fires before a COI expires rather than after.
- N03What about field service software built for trades?
- Often the correct answer, and cheaper and faster than a build. It stops fitting when your pricing method is unusual, when your jurisdiction demands compliance detail the product does not model, or when the product's job structure and yours disagree in a way you end up working around every day.
- N04How does progress billing work in a custom system?
- The schedule and the billing are the same system rather than two, so invoicing against completed work uses what the system already knows is complete. Deposits and draws can be taken by card or bank transfer through Stripe Connect into the contractor's own account, with fees computed in whole cents and refunds returning the fee proportionally.
- N05Can the crew use it on site without a laptop?
- Yes, and the interface should be deliberately narrow. In one system in production the crew moves a job forward by tapping a button in Telegram, and only the legal next step is offered. It refuses free text and voice notes on purpose, because one misheard word would move a real job.
- N06Do estimates and contracts get signed inside the system?
- Yes, built in-house rather than through a third-party signing product. The client opens a link, reads the estimate and signs on their phone; the signature page is composited into the real PDF with both names, the date, and an audit trail that records IP and user agent. Links expire and requests can be voided.