A CRM for a trade, built on customer and site

A sales CRM models three things: a company, a contact and a deal. A trade needs something slightly different, and the difference causes most of the trouble. The customer who pays, the site where the work happens, and the job itself are three separate records. Each one links to the others, and none of them substitutes for another.

Most trade businesses discover this by accident. They record the customer carefully, type the address into a field on the job, and find that nothing survives to the second visit. The access code learned in March went home in somebody's van.

The paying customer is rarely at the address

A property manager pays the invoice. A tenant lets the technician in and knows what is broken. The owner appears only when something expensive needs approving. Treating those three as one customer means the invoice, the access instructions and the approval request all land on the same record. One of them then reaches the wrong person.

Diract CRM holds each of them as its own contact and links them to the site with a role. The invoice goes to the payer, and the access note stays where tomorrow's technician will read it. Nobody has to remember any of it from the original call.

A site carries what a customer cannot

The gate code, the switchboard location, the parking, the dog, the asbestos note. All of it belongs to the address rather than to whoever booked the job. A customer with four rental properties needs four site records. Putting the last visit's details on the contact quietly loses the other three.

The value shows up on the second visit. A technician arriving with notes spends the first ten minutes working rather than ringing the office for a code. Across a round of forty maintenance visits that recovers most of a day, from records somebody built once. Our guide to site records covers filling them in as you go.

The job links the two and carries the money

A job names its customer and its site, holds its priced lines, and moves through a status everybody reads the same way. That last part is what makes a jobs list usable rather than decorative. Booked, in progress, done, invoiced and paid covers most trades, and each one is a fact anybody can check.

In Diract CRM a job's quote becomes its invoice. The lines the customer agreed become the lines on their bill, without anybody retyping them a fortnight later. Our guide to quote to invoice without retyping covers why that gap is the most common source of billing disputes.

Opening a customer should answer the call

Somebody rings about a leak they reported a fortnight ago. The useful screen shows their sites, every job at each, and what remains unpaid. That is the whole test of a trade CRM. Four screens to answer one question means the call ends with a promise to ring back, and the promise is what customers remember.

The same screen handles the harder version. A customer disputing an invoice needs the job, its lines, its photographs and the variation they approved on the day. Diract CRM keeps all four against the job, which turns a long conversation into a short one.

Enquiries, equipment and recurring work

A missed call at two o'clock is not a delayed job. It is a job that went to whoever answered five minutes later. Diract CRM keeps an Enquiries list, and the form on your website writes into it directly. Nothing then depends on somebody remembering a voicemail from a busy afternoon.

Equipment and recurring work sit at the other end of the same relationship. The unit installed, its model and its service history decide the next conversation about repair or replacement. A maintenance agreement repeats in Diract CRM. Each visit then appears in the jobs list four weeks ahead, with its customer, site, person and lines.

Suppliers, photographs and the round

Suppliers and subcontractors belong in the same list as customers, separated by a classification. The trade account number, the delivery days and the subbie's insurance expiry all get looked up under pressure. Keeping them beside the customers means one search rather than two systems and a phone.

Photographs belong on the job rather than in a camera roll. A picture of the meter, the damage or the finished work is evidence, and evidence nobody can find is worth nothing. The round matters for the same practical reason: two customers in one suburb on different days cost two drives. Our guide to planning the day's runs covers ordering the stops once the sites carry real addresses.

What to change first

• The paying customer and the site are separate linked records
• Access notes, hazards and equipment sit on the site
• Every job names its customer, its site and its status
• Opening a customer shows their sites, jobs and outstanding money
• Enquiries land in a list rather than a voicemail
• Maintenance agreements repeat rather than relying on memory
• Photographs attach to the job at the moment somebody takes them