JunkBossPro Blog — Estimates & Quotes

From Approved Junk Removal Estimate to Scheduled Job, With Nothing Retyped

In a lot of junk removal companies, the quote and the job live in two different places. The quote is a text message or a note on a notepad. The job is a line on a whiteboard or a calendar entry. Somebody copies one into the other, and somewhere in that copy, the half load becomes a quarter load, or the fridge falls off the list, or the gate code never makes it.

The Copy Step That Breaks Things

Getting the customer to say yes was covered in Online Estimate Approval: Letting Junk Removal Customers Say Yes Without a Phone Call. This article picks up right after that yes.

Every time a person retypes a job, there is a chance to get it wrong. And the mistakes do not show up until the crew is standing in a driveway with the wrong truck, or the invoice does not match what the customer approved. In JunkBossPro, an approved estimate becomes the scheduled job. There is no copy step.

What Carries Over

When the estimate turns into a job, everything on it comes along:

• Line items. The load size, single items, specialty items and add-ons from your service list, at the prices the customer approved.
• Truck load. The expected load, from Min Load up to 3 loads.
• Items and what is going. The item count and the plain-words description, like “Washer and dryer in the garage.”
• Haul-to. Dump, transfer station, donation center or metal recycler.
• Weight terms. The tons included and your per-ton rate for any dump fee overage.
• Notes. Anything from the call, the photos or the estimate visit.

Access notes and past notes live on the address, so they show on the job automatically too.

Picking the Day and the Truck

With the job created, the office decides when and on which truck. The dispatch board shows jobs by day, and you can filter by truck. A common setup is one truck on single items and small loads and another on cleanouts and big jobs, and the load size on the job makes it obvious where it belongs.

The Waiting List helps here too. Every request not yet booked sits on a live map and a list, so the office can see what is near the day's route before placing the new job. A three-quarter-load garage cleanout three streets from Thursday's estate job is an easy fit. More on that in Using the Waiting List Map to Fit New Junk Removal Estimates Into the Week.

Route Order

Once the job is on a day and a truck, it needs a place in the route. The office can set the order by hand or auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the yard. Saved views keep the board the way you like it, and route sheets can be printed if a crew still wants paper in the cab.

What the Crew Sees

The crew app on the crew's phone shows the day's jobs in route order. Each card carries what came from the estimate:

• The load size, items and what is going
• Navigation to the customer and a Go button to the drop-off
• Access notes and past notes
• Start, Skip and Complete buttons
• Before and after photos

The crew is working from the same record the customer approved. No one has to call the office to ask what the job was supposed to be.

The Customer Side

Once the job is scheduled, the customer's alerts take over. Depending on their preferences, they get a night-before reminder, a text when they are next and a text when the crew arrives. In the customer app, they can see the day's route on a live map, with their place in line.

The automatic on-the-way and arrived texts go out from the crew app as the crew works the route, so the office does not have to send them by hand.

From Job to Invoice

When the crew taps Complete, the invoice is created from the job's line items. If the load changed on site and the office updated it, the invoice reflects the change. If a dump ticket shows tons over the included weight, the overage line is added automatically. A card on file can be charged right then. The quote, the job and the invoice all tell the same story.

It also keeps the whole team honest. If the customer calls to ask what they are paying for, the office reads the same lines the crew saw and the same lines that will print on the invoice. Nobody has to dig through texts to rebuild what was promised, and nobody has to guess which version of the quote was the real one.

One Record, Start to Finish

Keeping one record from estimate to invoice is the simplest way to cut mistakes in a junk business. To see how it connects to the rest of quoting, head back to the JunkBossPro junk removal estimate software page.