Plumbing — commercial and residential
Forty techs, two departments, one board
Charlie’s Plumbing runs residential and commercial as two lines of business out of one company, with forty-plus technicians billing real work through ServiceProof against their real system, every working day. Not a pilot, and not a demo dataset.
Two lines of business do not fit on one list
Residential plumbing is not commercial plumbing, and the person who dispatches one is not the person who dispatches the other. Most software makes you choose which of those two facts to model.
- A department is the line of business. Residential, commercial, service, install. It is who does the work and how it is measured.
- A zone is the territory and the P&L centre. It owns a team — a CSR, a billing clerk, a fleet — and a timezone, and it is the unit you measure profit in.
- Departments cut across zones, because everybody has plumbing. Neither dimension nests inside the other, and a system that forces one inside the other has already lost half your reporting.
- Boards are named, saved sets of filters and there are as many as you want. Charlie’s runs three off one dataset — service on one, repairs on another, Draft Horse on a third — and each of them can carry its own rules.
One saved board. Commercial and residential work side by side, each card carrying the site, the complaint and the promise.
The PM is the schedule’s shock absorber
Quarterly agreements, backflow tests, seasonal work. When a heat wave lands or a freeze hits, PM work is what gets pushed — so deferrability is something the model carries from the first table rather than a feature added afterwards.
A window, not a date
Every occurrence carries earliest, target and due-by. The schedule knows what may move and how far before anybody starts dragging jobs around.
Bulk rescheduling is cheap
A freeze week does not mean a dispatcher moving sixty jobs one at a time, and finding out on Thursday which ones she should not have.
It warns you before a breach
Not after. If pushing this job puts you outside what the agreement promised, you hear about it while you can still decide something.
And a breach is recorded
At the time, with what happened. That is what an argument with a customer turns on a year later, and it either got written down when it happened or it did not.
Push the ones that can move. It tells you which cannot, before you do it — and the reason you type is stored on each one.
Backflow testing is the clean example: the test has a due date somebody else enforces, the work is short, and it stacks — so you want three in a day in one area, and you want to know which of them can slide a week and which cannot. How recurring work is modelled →
The callback you win because you walked in knowing
Every visit anyone ever made to that building. Every photograph going back years. The equipment that is actually installed and what its dataplate says. In the tech’s hand, in the truck, before they knock.
- You do not re-do last year’s repair and charge for it twice.
- The quote is grounded in what is actually there, not what somebody remembers.
- Notes are a subsystem, not one memo field everybody fights over — so the parts note, the billing note and the site note are all still legible after four people have touched the job.
- A note can belong to the customer and apply at every location that customer currently backs, including sublocations. When a national account changes hands, the right notes follow.
Years of site photographs, banded by year.
Found from a phrase in a note nobody remembers writing.
The other end of the same page
A two-truck shop should not pay an enterprise tax
Tarvin Plumbing is residential, small, and has no interest in configuring a P&L centre to dispatch tomorrow’s work. Same board, same workflows, and none of the commercial machinery in the way — because zones, departments and agreements are things you turn on when you need them, not a setup wizard you have to survive first.