Plumbers Pack

Early on, we learned that most plumbing service businesses use QuickBooks and Microsoft Office products like Outlook, Word and Excel to run their business. QuickBooks software seemed to be meeting the needs of the accounting department but there were too many office and field functions that were operationally disconnected with enormous duplication and overhead requirements.

To tie the whole business operation together, QuickBooks needed additional functionality.

The workflow process starts with the initial customer call or sales opportunity; tracking all of the customer communications and history; flowing the service and installation paperwork through the quoting and proposal process; allowing purchase order to be created seamlessly in QuickBooks; and finally tracking the work order schedule on a calendar with the ability to create the billings inside QuickBooks rather than requiring another accounting software program.

Plumbers Pack Software was designed to meet that specific need.

The software is a uniquely designed service operations software solution which provides an all-in-one plug-and-play solution seamlessly integrated to your existing QuickBook’s customers and jobs.

What about the demand for a more “paper-less” or “paper-lite” office? This seemed to be another challenging area for most plumbing service businesses. Tracking customers paper forms and electronic documents. A typical job might have vendor documents in email folders, Word, Excel documents and pictures in different areas, with appointments scheduled in different Outlook folders or Google calendars.

Plumbers Pack is designed to pull all of these documents together into one location: the customers history screen. Anyone can quickly review any of these scanned and electronic documents. Simple and seamless document control. Adding a mobile paperless solution for the service technicians would also help to streamline the operation.

Plumbers Pack Software for QuickBooks

Plumbers Pack Software for QuickBooks is designed to address the unique needs of the residential, commercial and industrial plumbing service company. Plumbers Pack links seamlessly with the popular QuickBooks Software to provide a simple-to-use and easy-to-learn solution for quick customer history, quote preparation, work order scheduling and advertising/ marketing.

Plumbers Pack Software eliminates the typical duplicate entry issues that tend to waste valuable time by owners and their employees. With Plumbers Pack you are able to continue using all of your familiar QuickBooks accounting processes &with the added convenience of tracking customer job locations, work order and equipment history, preventative maintenance reminders, customer quotes, and scheduling. This streamlines your entire office operations process.

Plumbers Pack Software for QuickBooks Provides Four Main Modules With It’s Connection to QuickBooks Software

The Service/ Installation Scheduling module allows the user to quickly find any QuickBooks customer and review their complete customer history on one screen. Plumbers Pack’s design eliminates the need to search through multiple menus to quickly find what you are looking for. You can also drill down into the detail of any past work orders or quotes for reference. Plumbers Pack also tracks each customers plumbing installations ( just in case a replacement part is required) along with maintenance schedules, unlimited contacts, agreements, notes, sales activities, attachments, and phone call history.

Work orders for service calls and new installs can be printed and scheduled on Microsoft’s Outlook calendar software for all of the computers connected to the network. Using Outlooks easy drag-and-drop features the work orders can be quickly assigned to a new service technician. When the work orders are completed the labor and parts used can be entered. Each completed work order will automatically create an invoice, estimate or sales order in QuickBooks to eliminate the duplicate entry required for billing. This speeds up the normal billing process, reduces the amount of clerical entry and increases cash flow.

The Sales and Quoting module provides a powerful alternative for automating your quoting process. Plumbers Pack Software is one of the only software tools which allows you to prepare quotes from multiple manufacturers and multiple product lines. There are four methods provided for preparing quotes in Plumbers Pack: scanning and attaching handwritten quotes, importing existing QuickBooks or Excel quotes or creating complete quotes and proposals using the Plumbers Pack Software. Items may be selected from the QuickBooks Items File lists or from multiple Excel price lists.

After proposals are printed they are tracked in the customer’s history record. With a simple click of the mouse an existing quote may be turned into a a sale and tracked as an installation work order for scheduling and billing.

Another very handy feature of the Sales and Quoting module is the ability for your sales reps to track their customer’s follow-up activity. The Information Dashboard allows the sales person to quickly find all open follow-up items by date and by customer.This is very similar to managing your own ToDo activity list.

Plumbers Pack’s Marketing and Advertising module allows you to track the source of each incoming call to better manage monthly advertising expenses. It also provides a method for creating customer and prospect mailing labels and various mail merge letters for promotions, etc.

Opportunity Tracking

Plumbers Pack Service Software for QuickBooks allows you to track all of your new sales and service opportunities along with the advertising source for tracking your marketing expenditures. With a click of a button you are able to review the number of sales opportunities by opportunity type as well as the advertising source. Plumbers Pack also tracks the number of converted opportunities to sales quotes and actual sales. This allows the dealer to better manage their monthly advertising budgets and make adjustment as needed. Advertising sources are tracked for managing your monthly advertising expenses.

Plumbing Pack also allows you to quickly print mailing labels and export other customer lists from your customer and prospect databases for mail-merge mailing marketing projects.

With the Sales and Service Opportunity Tracking module in Plumbers Pack you can now keep track of all of your potential sales and service opportunities as well as any follow-up customer actions needed. As your sales and service staff adds follow-up activities, they are tracked in our quick-view dashboard for immediate reminders and review.This saves valuable time for owners and managers tracking the status of outstanding customer tasks and other related activities.

Quoting and Sales Tracking

The Plumbers Pack Quoting and Sales Tracking module allows the sales rep to quickly prepare a quote. Plumbers Pack software provides flexibility to handle hand written quotes as well as Excel designed quotes and manually prepared quotes.

Initially the user works with Fireline Systems to import their primary manufacturers parts into Plumbers Pack. Inventory items that are being tracked are set up in the QuickBooks item lists. Pricing is updated in Plumbers Pack using manufacturer provided price updates or manually updated. Quoting templates along with options and option pick lists are easily put together in Plumbers Pack. Once these templates are assembled it is easy for the sales person is ready to create quick quotes. Templates can be modified at any time.

After the quote items have been selected you can add labor, misc items and any notes. Plumbers Pack provides a quote analysis section to determine your customer mark up and/ or gross margin. Plumbers Pack also provides flexibility to allow you to provide a lump sum discount or a percentage discount. Commission are calculated and the quote can be printed and/or emailed to the customer.

Service/Installation

Plumbers Pack’s service dispatch scheduling software allows you to create work orders for service calls as well as new installations. To create a new work order select the customer record and click on New Work Order. The work order entry screen below will appear. Select the type of work order from a simple drop-down list and complete the form. After the information has been entered for this work order click on the Create or Create/ Print button to print this work order and dispatch the work order the the calendar dispatch board with simple drag and drop features.