CorkCRM

Objective: Run a contracting business from one app

Painters, remodelers, and other home improvement contractors juggle the same cycle every week: chase leads, book estimates, write proposals, get a signature, schedule a crew, and figure out whether the job made money. Most were doing it with a whiteboard, a paper calendar, and a spreadsheet.

CorkCRM’s founder, a contractor himself, wanted a product other contractors could sign up for and run their business on. Web Ascender wireframed, designed, and built it as a subscription SaaS, then kept developing it as customers asked for more.

What Web Ascender Did

• Product design - wireframes for every workflow, from the proposal builder to the timecards and the super admin dashboard, then the visual design and marketing site
• Multi-tenant SaaS - each contractor’s company in its own account, with owners, admins, and staff, and permissions down to who can view or manage leads, jobs, appointments, and timecards
• Subscriptions - self-serve sign-up with a free trial, plan tiers, card billing and invoices, failed-payment handling, and trial and renewal emails
• Lead capture - lead tracking with sources and communication history, CSV imports, geocoding, and an embeddable lead form contractors put on their own websites
• Appointments - an appointment calendar with confirmation emails to the customer and reminders
• Proposals and contracts - reusable proposal templates with sections and items, an issuing workflow with reminder emails, e-signatures on a phone or tablet, contracts emailed as PDFs, a customer portal, and proposals that lock once signed
• Jobs and crews - a color-coded job schedule by crew, multi-day jobs, a crew calendar, unscheduled jobs, and touch-up visits
• Timecards, expenses, and payments - crew timecards with approval and locking, wage rates, expense categories, and job payments
• Reporting - a dashboard of key metrics, lead and profit reports, and a job costing report
• Customer feedback - a job-completion survey sent to the homeowner when the work is done
• Branded email - editable email templates with merge tokens, sent under each contractor’s own name and logo
• French - the full app and its emails translated, with per-user language settings and Canadian postal codes
• Marketing - a public site with a built-in content manager and blog, plus SEO research and recommendations

The Outcome

CorkCRM launched as a working subscription product: a contractor could start a free trial, put a lead form on their website, and run the whole cycle from first call to job costing in one place. Over the next two years we kept adding to it, including a round of custom scheduling and costing features for one of its larger customers.

The illustration uses sample data.