An HVAC dispatcher assigns service calls to technicians, sets and keeps the arrival windows customers are promised, and rebuilds the day when jobs run long, parts are missing or a technician calls out. In a residential service company the dispatcher is also the person protecting technician time: every hour a technician spends waiting for an assignment, driving across town out of sequence or going back for a part is an hour nobody bills.
That is the short answer. The longer one matters more, because the same job title describes a very different seat in a residential service company than in a commercial one, and hiring for the wrong version is one of the most common reasons a dispatch hire does not stick.
In residential service, the day usually runs in three phases.
The board is built for the day: scheduled maintenance visits, booked repairs, install days and return trips carried over from yesterday. The dispatcher checks that every job is matched to a technician who can actually do it, that parts on order have arrived, that job notes are complete and that customers have been reminded. A quiet morning is usually the product of a well-organized evening.
Every job is closed out in the field service software with notes, photos and payment status confirmed. Unfinished work is rebooked, tomorrow's board is adjusted for anything that slipped, and invoices and payments are handed cleanly to the office - usually to a construction bookkeeper who reconciles what technicians collected against what was billed.
The trade is the same. The customer, the promise and the paperwork are not.
| Residential service | Commercial service | |
|---|---|---|
| Where work comes from | Inbound calls, online bookings, membership tune-ups and technician-generated leads | Work orders from facility and property managers, customer portals and maintenance contracts |
| What you promise | An arrival window, often the same day | A response time written into a service agreement |
| Who you talk to | Homeowners, often at home, waiting and uncomfortable | Facility managers, property managers and site contacts |
| How technicians are matched | Nearest qualified technician, with sales-trained technicians sent to older systems | Technicians with site history, access clearance and experience on the equipment |
| What closes the job | Payment at the door, a membership renewal or a replacement lead handed to sales | A signed service ticket, a portal update, a maintenance report and an invoice against the agreement |
| What drives the peaks | The weather | Contract schedules, with emergencies on top |
A dispatcher with years of commercial work orders knows how to hit a response time and keep a customer portal current. That does not mean they know how to talk to a homeowner whose heat went out, or how to stop a membership tune-up schedule from collapsing during the first heat wave of the summer. The reverse is also true. When you hire, hire for the version of the job you actually run.
Residential HVAC demand follows the weather, and the weather gives no notice. The first real heat wave or cold snap can turn a manageable board into an impossible one inside a morning.
This is where dispatch earns its cost. The decisions made during a surge decide how much of the demand becomes revenue and how much becomes complaints:
Shoulder seasons are the other half of the job. When the phones go quiet, a good dispatcher fills the board with the maintenance visits the company has already sold, so memberships are delivered rather than just collected. That longer-horizon work is where dispatch starts to overlap with service coordination.
Smaller residential companies often have one person doing all three. The seats separate cleanly as volume grows:
| Role | Owns | Measured by |
|---|---|---|
| Customer service representative | The phone and the booking: answering, scheduling, membership and billing questions | Calls answered, calls booked, customer experience |
| Dispatcher | The board and technician time, from the first call of the day to the last job closed | Technician productivity, arrival windows kept, jobs closed the same day |
| Service coordinator | Everything that is not today: maintenance schedules, warranty claims, quotes to follow up and return visits | Agreements delivered, quotes sent, warranty claims recovered |
In many companies the customer service role and dispatch share a seat until the phone and the board peak at the same time, at which point one of them loses. We cover the difference between a dispatcher and a service coordinator in a separate guide, and a dedicated service coordinator is usually the next seat once maintenance agreements start slipping.
Technician count is a rough guide at best. The clearer signals are operational, and most owners recognize several at once:
Then put a number on it. Add up the technician hours lost to scheduling last week and the value of the leads that went nowhere. If that figure is larger than the cost of the seat, you are already paying for a dispatcher. You are just paying in lost time instead of wages.
Yes. Dispatch already runs on software: the field service platform holds the board and the customer record, the phone system routes the calls, and GPS shows where the trucks are. A remote dispatcher works in the same systems as an in-house one and sees the same information. What stays local is physical - the parts room, the keys, the trucks and the morning conversation in the shop.
Remote dispatch works best when three things are in place:
For the wider picture, see which construction positions can work remotely.
If you are weighing a remote hire, our remote construction dispatcher page explains how the role is scoped, and the HVAC contractors page covers the other positions heating and cooling companies typically add.
Most residential HVAC companies dispatch from a field service management platform - ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and FieldEdge are common examples - alongside a phone system and GPS tracking for the trucks. The specific platform matters less than whether the dispatcher has run a live board in one before, because the habits transfer faster than the menus.
Not quite. A customer service representative answers the phone and books the work. A dispatcher owns what happens after the booking: which technician goes, in what order, and what changes when the day does. Smaller companies combine the two, which works until call volume and schedule changes peak at the same time.
There is no reliable standard ratio. It depends on call volume, the mix of same-day and scheduled work, whether someone else answers the phones, and how well the software is set up. A more useful signal than technician count is whether the board is actively managed all day or only built in the morning and patched when something breaks.
Enough to triage: recognizing an emergency, matching a call to a technician's skill level and asking the right questions before a truck rolls. Dispatchers do not diagnose equipment or quote repairs. Technical decisions stay with your technicians and service manager.
That depends on the schedule agreed when the role is defined. Some companies want evening coverage from the dispatcher, while others route overnight calls to an on-call technician or an answering service. Decide which model you run before hiring, because it changes who is a fit.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
A roofing insurance supplement is a documented request asking the insurance carrier to add items or quantities the original claim estimate left out: code-required materials, components the adjuster missed, measurement differences, or damage found once the old roof came off. Whoever writes supplements needs accurate measurements and photos, fluency in the estimate format the carrier uses, and the persistence to follow every request until it is approved or closed.
For residential roofing companies that work insurance claims, the real question is not whether to supplement. It is who owns it: the sales rep who sold the job, the owner, an outside supplement company, or a dedicated team member. Each can work. Each fails in a predictable way.
This guide is general information about running a roofing operation, not legal or insurance advice. Rules on contractors and insurance claims vary by state.
Claim estimates are often written quickly, from a single inspection, and they can be incomplete for honest reasons. Items that commonly need supplementing fall into a few groups:
Every item needs support: photos, a measurement report, the applicable code requirement or the manufacturer's installation instructions. A supplement without documentation is an argument. A supplement with documentation is a line item.
Rarely because nobody knows how. Usually because nobody owns it.
There are four common models. The right one depends on claim volume, margins and how much control you want over the file.
| Model | How you pay for it | What you control | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales rep or project manager | Their time | Everything, in theory | Supplements wait until the next sale is done, which is never |
| Owner | The owner's evenings | Everything | Scale. It works for a handful of claims and fails in storm season |
| Outside supplement company | Commonly a percentage of the additional amount approved, or a fee per claim | Less, because the file and carrier communication partly move outside your business | Cost on large claims, and supplements written by people who never see your crews or your jobs |
| Dedicated coordinator, in-house or remote | Wages for a position | The file, the photos, the follow-up and the standards | Needs a clear scope, good field photos and close review of early work |
Outside supplement companies are a legitimate choice, particularly for contractors with low or irregular claim volume, or those still learning the process. The economics shift as volume grows: a percentage fee rises with every claim, while the cost of a position does not. Past a certain volume the arithmetic favors a dedicated person, and what they learn about each carrier's process stays inside your business.
The role is document work from start to finish, which is why it transfers well to a remote team member. A typical workflow:
Many carriers write property claims in Xactimate, so experience reading and building estimates in that format is a practical requirement. The skills overlap with estimating: if your company also prices retail replacements, a remote construction estimator with insurance experience can often cover both kinds of scope.
Get this right before you scale supplementing, because the rules are set state by state.
In many states, negotiating or adjusting an insurance claim on a policyholder's behalf is regulated activity that requires a public adjuster license, and some states specifically restrict what contractors can do on a homeowner's claim. Documenting and supporting the scope of work you were hired to perform is generally treated differently from advocating on the claim itself. Where that line sits in your state is a question for an attorney who knows your state's insurance laws. Some states also prohibit contractors from paying, waiving or rebating a homeowner's deductible.
Guardrails worth putting in writing:
Yes. Nothing in the supplement workflow requires standing on the roof except capturing the evidence, and that happens anyway during inspection and production. The coordinator works from photos, measurement reports, the carrier's estimate and your CRM.
That makes field documentation the real dependency. Before adding anyone to supplementing, set a photo standard for inspectors and crews: every slope, every penetration, every layer at tear-off and every damaged deck board, labeled and uploaded the same day. A remote coordinator can only document what the field captured.
The rest of the paperwork around a claim job moves the same way. A construction administrative assistant can handle permits, material orders and the job file, a customer service assistant can keep homeowners updated on where their job stands, and a construction accounting assistant can chase final payments and depreciation releases so they do not sit for months.
Largely, yes. Water, fire and mold work is commonly billed against insurance claims with the same dependence on documentation: moisture readings, photos, drying logs and line-item estimates that have to reconcile with what the carrier approves. The difference is speed. Restoration files start on the first day of an emergency, and documentation missed then usually cannot be rebuilt later.
Our restoration contractors page covers the roles those companies add, and the roofing contractors page covers storm and retail roofing operations.
Pull your last twenty closed insurance jobs. For each one, check three things: whether a supplement was submitted where it was warranted, how long it took from submission to a decision, and how long final payment took after the roof was finished.
If supplements were skipped or final payments lagged by weeks, supplementing has no owner. At low claim volume, an outside supplement company can fill that gap without adding a position. Once claims are steady, a dedicated coordinator gives you more control over the file at a fixed cost.
A supplement is a documented request to add items or quantities to a claim estimate. A reinspection is a return visit to the property by the carrier's adjuster, which can be triggered by a supplement, a disagreement over scope or newly found damage. When the documentation is clear, a supplement can often be resolved without one.
It depends on the state and on what the contractor is doing. Documenting and supporting your own scope of work is generally treated differently from negotiating a claim for the homeowner, which in many states requires a public adjuster license. Because definitions and penalties vary, have an attorney familiar with your state's insurance laws review your process and contract language.
Supplements are usually built in the estimating format the carrier uses, most often Xactimate, and supported by a measurement report, inspection photos and the job file in your roofing CRM. The ability to read a carrier's estimate line by line matters as much as the software.
Common structures are a percentage of the additional amount the carrier approves or a flat fee per claim, and terms vary between providers. Read the agreement closely for what counts toward the fee and who communicates with the carrier.
In smaller companies they often do, because they know the roof. The risk is timing: supplementing competes with selling, and selling usually wins. A common middle ground is for reps to capture complete documentation while a coordinator builds, submits and follows up.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
Most of the work behind certified payroll can be outsourced or delegated: collecting time records, applying the wage determination, preparing the weekly report, gathering subcontractor payrolls and keeping the records in order. The responsibility cannot. Your company remains accountable for paying the required wages and for the accuracy of every payroll it certifies, and the Statement of Compliance must be signed by the contractor or subcontractor, or by their agent who pays or supervises the payment of workers.
So the useful question is not whether to hand certified payroll to someone else. It is which parts, to whom, and how you keep enough control to sign with confidence.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Prevailing wage requirements depend on the contract, the funding source and the state, and they change. Confirm current requirements with the contracting agency or a qualified advisor.
Certified payroll is the payroll report contractors and subcontractors submit on construction projects covered by prevailing wage laws. Federally, the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts apply to federally funded or assisted contracts over $2,000 for the construction, alteration or repair of public buildings or public works, and they require laborers and mechanics to be paid at least the wages and fringe benefits in the project's wage determination (U.S. Department of Labor).
Under the federal contract clauses in 29 CFR 5.5:
State and local prevailing wage laws add their own layer. California requires contractors on most public works projects to submit certified payroll records to the Labor Commissioner through the Department of Industrial Relations' online system. Illinois requires contractors on projects subject to its Prevailing Wage Act to file certified payroll with the Illinois Department of Labor. Forms, deadlines and portals vary, so confirm each project's rules at the start rather than at the first submission.
| Task | Delegate it? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Collecting and organizing time records | Yes | Depends on field timekeeping by project and classification |
| Applying the wage determination | Prepared by a delegate, reviewed by you | Classification drives the rate, so errors are expensive |
| Preparing the weekly report | Yes | In your payroll system, on Form WH-347 or an accepted equivalent |
| Collecting subcontractor payrolls | Yes | Late subcontractor reports can hold up the whole submission |
| Uploading to agency or prime contractor portals | Yes | With access set up in your company's name |
| Responding to routine correction requests | Yes | With clear rules for escalating anything beyond clerical fixes |
| Signing the Statement of Compliance | Only to an authorized agent who pays or supervises payment | The certification carries legal weight, whoever signs it |
| Deciding unclear classification questions | No | Ask the contracting agency or a qualified advisor |
| Paying the required wages | No | Always the contractor's obligation |
The Statement of Compliance is not a formality. Under the federal rules, falsifying certified payroll can expose a contractor to civil or criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and 31 U.S.C. 3729, and contractors who disregard their prevailing wage obligations can be debarred from government contracts. Whoever prepares the payroll, the person signing it needs a review process they can stand behind.
| Option | Works well when | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Payroll software with certified payroll reports | Your payroll data is clean and someone in-house reviews the output | Software produces the report. It does not check classifications or chase subcontractors |
| Payroll or compliance service | You have occasional prevailing wage projects and want a specialist process | Your time records still have to be right, and project details have to reach them on time |
| Your bookkeeper or office manager | Volume is low and they have real capacity | It becomes a weekly deadline competing with everything else they own |
| A dedicated construction accounting assistant, in-house or remote | Public or prevailing wage work is a steady share of revenue | Needs a defined scope, system access and a review step before signature |
For contractors with occasional public work, software or a service is often enough. Where public, institutional or union work is a regular part of the business, the weekly volume - especially subcontractor collection - can justify a dedicated role. A construction accounting assistant can own the weekly cycle inside your payroll system under the direction of your controller or bookkeeper. In companies without either, a construction bookkeeper can carry it as part of the wider financial cycle, as covered in what a construction bookkeeper actually manages.
General contractors carry an extra layer, because every subcontractor's payroll flows through them. It is one of the tasks worth moving off project managers' desks, as covered in before you hire another project manager.
Yes. Certified payroll is document work done in payroll software, spreadsheets, agency portals and email, and none of it requires being on site as long as field time records reach the office in usable form. What must stay with your company is the authority: the signature on the Statement of Compliance, decisions on classification questions, and responsibility for paying the required wages.
The load is heaviest in markets with a large share of public and institutional construction, such as Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and the rest of Virginia, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, Chicago and Illinois, and Sacramento. It applies to every trade on a covered project, from electrical contractors to concrete and masonry contractors.
No. On Davis-Bacon and Related Acts projects, the required weekly payroll information can be submitted on the Department of Labor's Optional Form WH-347 or in any other format that contains the same information. State programs and contracting agencies may require their own forms or online systems.
For Davis-Bacon and Related Acts work, weekly, for each week in which covered work is performed. State prevailing wage programs set their own schedules and systems, so check the requirements for each project.
Under the federal rules, the contractor or subcontractor, or the contractor's or subcontractor's agent who pays or supervises the payment of the workers. Whoever signs, the company remains responsible for the accuracy of the payroll and for paying the required wages.
For Davis-Bacon and Related Acts work, at least three years after all the work on the prime contract is completed. State rules and your own contracts may require longer.
Yes. Preparation, subcontractor collection and submission are document work that transfers well to a remote role working inside your payroll system. Signature authority, classification decisions and compliance responsibility stay with your company.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
Most bookkeeping answers one question: did the company make money this month. Construction bookkeeping has to answer a harder one: did this job make money, and is the one running right now going to.
That difference is not a matter of degree. It changes the chart of accounts, the coding discipline, the reporting cycle and the definition of a receivable. A competent general bookkeeper can keep a contractor's books tidy and still leave the owner unable to answer the only question that matters.
If you have ever finished a job that looked profitable on the profit and loss and felt poorer afterwards, this is usually why.
A construction bookkeeper carries the recurring financial cycle of the business. In a typical month that means:
None of that requires being in the building. All of it requires knowing construction.
Everything else on that list exists to make job costing possible. If cost coding is inconsistent, the job cost report is fiction, and every decision that depends on it - what to bid, what to charge, which work to stop taking - is being made on a number that is not true.
Good job costing gives you three things. You can see a job going wrong while there is still time to react. You can price the next one from what the last one actually cost rather than what you assumed. And you can tell the difference between a busy company and a profitable one, which are not the same and do not always occur together.
The discipline is unglamorous: every invoice coded to the right job and the right cost code, every time, including the small ones and the ones that arrive at the end of the month. That consistency is the deliverable.
The most common failure. Expenses land in correct company-level accounts - materials, subcontractors, equipment - with no job attached, or attached inconsistently. The financials are technically right and operationally useless. Rebuilding a year of this retrospectively is expensive and approximate.
Retention is billed but not collectible until conditions are met, sometimes many months later. Booked as a normal receivable it inflates what appears to be collectible and hides a cash gap that is entirely predictable. It needs its own treatment and its own tracking.
On jobs spanning months, revenue recognised has to be reconciled against work actually completed. Without that, over- and under-billing goes unnoticed, and the profit and loss reports a month that did not happen. Owners are frequently surprised by this at year end, when their CPA adjusts it.
Releasing subcontractor payment without the lien waiver or a current insurance certificate is a risk decision made by accident. A construction bookkeeper treats those documents as a payment condition rather than an afterthought.
These are different roles and the distinction decides which one you should hire.
A construction bookkeeper owns the books. They keep the ledger, run the cycle, produce the reports and are accountable for the numbers being right. Hire one when nobody currently owns that, or when the owner or office manager is doing it between other jobs.
A construction accounting assistant supports a finance function that already exists. They process payables and receivables, chase compliance documents and prepare the routine work under someone else's direction. Hire one when you already have a controller, an accountant or a capable bookkeeper who is spending too much time on processing.
Hiring an assistant when you needed a bookkeeper leaves nobody accountable. Hiring a bookkeeper when you needed an assistant creates an expensive overlap.
A bookkeeper is not a replacement for your accountant, and the boundary matters. Tax strategy, tax filing, year-end adjustments, formal financial statement preparation, entity structure and audit representation stay with your CPA.
What a good bookkeeper does is make the CPA's job cheaper and their advice better, because the year begins with clean, job-coded books instead of a reconstruction exercise. Most contractors underestimate how much of their accounting bill is their accountant fixing bookkeeping.
You cannot produce a current job cost report without building it by hand. Invoices are entered in batches when somebody has time. You have discovered a job was unprofitable only after it closed. Reconciliations are more than a month behind. Lien waivers are chased after payment. The owner is doing books on Sunday.
Any two of those together is usually the point at which the cost of not having the role exceeds the cost of the role.
Yes, and it is one of the most natural remote roles in a contracting business. The work is entirely inside your accounting software, your document storage and your banking portal. What stays local is anything physical - cheque signing, mail collection, and any in-person banking your institution requires.
Whatever you already run. In construction that is commonly QuickBooks, sometimes with a job costing layer on top, and in larger companies a construction-specific platform. Proficiency in your specific system is part of what we screen for, because generic accounting experience does not transfer cleanly to job costing.
No. Tax filing, tax strategy, year-end adjustments and formal statements stay with your CPA. The bookkeeper maintains the records those depend on, which usually reduces what your accountant has to charge you to produce them.
Yes. Certified payroll preparation, wage determination checks and weekly report assembly are document work and transfer well to a remote role. Compliance responsibility and the signature on the statement of compliance remain with your company.
A firm processes transactions to a service level, usually for many clients, and rarely learns your jobs. A placed bookkeeper works as part of your team, in your systems, on your chart of accounts, and builds knowledge of your cost codes and your customers over time. The difference shows up most in job costing, which depends on familiarity.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
Ask ten service contractors what the difference is between a dispatcher and a service coordinator and you will get ten answers, several of which contradict each other. Some companies use the titles for the same seat. Some have both and cannot articulate the split. Most hire one, discover the other problem is still there, and conclude that the hire did not work.
The distinction is not academic. It decides which of your two operational problems gets solved, and hiring the wrong one costs a quarter.
The cleanest way to separate them: a dispatcher owns today. A service coordinator owns everything that is not today.
A dispatcher runs the board. Their working horizon is the next eight hours, occasionally the next two days, and their job is to keep technicians moving and customers informed while reality interferes with the plan.
In practice that means:
The measure of a good dispatcher is a day that ends with the board clean, the technicians productive and nobody calling the office to ask where their appointment went. For how the seat works in a residential heating and cooling company, see what an HVAC dispatcher does.
A service coordinator works on a longer clock. Their horizon is the week, the month and the contract term, and their job is to make sure that work which is not urgent still happens.
In practice that means:
The measure of a good service coordinator is that maintenance obligations do not slip, agreements renew, and the quotes generated from service calls actually get sent.
When contractors describe the pain, the answer is usually already in the description.
"We are constantly rescheduling and customers are angry about arrival windows." That is today. Dispatch.
"We sold forty maintenance agreements and I could not tell you how many we have actually delivered." That is this month. Coordination.
"Technicians find work that needs quoting and it never gets quoted." That is coordination, and it is usually the most expensive of the three, because it is revenue you already earned the right to and did not collect.
"The owner is doing both of these at nine at night." That is both, and the order matters. See below.
The two roles genuinely touch. Both live in the service software, both talk to customers, both interact with the same technicians. That overlap is why companies collapse them into one seat, and why it usually fails in a specific and predictable way.
Urgent work always wins. When one person holds both, the dispatch side consumes the day, because a technician standing still is a visible problem and a maintenance visit due in three weeks is not. The coordination work quietly stops happening. Agreements go undelivered, quotes go unsent, and nobody notices until renewal season or until the department's margin is reviewed.
This is not a discipline problem. It is a structural one. Anyone holding both roles will be pulled toward the urgent one every single day.
Technicians have idle gaps between calls. Customers are calling to ask where somebody is. The board is being run out of somebody's head or a whiteboard. Emergency calls are disrupting the whole day rather than a part of it. Your technician count has grown past roughly six and the informal system has stopped scaling.
Dispatch is basically working, but maintenance agreements are behind, warranty claims are being written off rather than claimed, and technician-generated quotes are dying in somebody's inbox. If you sell agreements and cannot immediately say what percentage have been delivered this year, this is your hire.
Most service companies past a certain size do. If you are hiring both, hire dispatch first and coordination second - not because it matters more, but because the dispatch work is what will otherwise eat the coordinator alive. Establishing dispatch as its own seat protects the coordination seat from being consumed by it.
Both roles are office positions. Neither one diagnoses equipment, makes a technical judgment about a repair, prices work that requires field assessment, or supervises technicians in the sense of managing their performance. They organise, communicate and document. The technical authority stays with your service manager and your technicians.
This is also why both roles transfer to remote work cleanly. Neither one has to be in the building. They have to be in your software, reachable by phone, and available during your service hours.
Take last week. Count two things: the hours technicians spent not working because of scheduling, and the number of technician-identified opportunities that never turned into a sent quote. Put a dollar figure on each.
Whichever number is larger is the role you hire first. It is usually not the one people expect.
For a small operation, yes, and many do. The failure point arrives predictably: as call volume grows, the urgent dispatch work consumes the day and the maintenance, warranty and quoting work stops happening. If you already hold both in one seat and the coordination side is slipping, that is the signal to split them rather than to ask for more effort.
Yes. Dispatch is phone, software and communication work. A remote dispatcher works in your field service platform exactly as an in-house one would, takes the same calls, and updates the same board. What stays local is anything physical - parts counter, warehouse, keys, vehicles.
They need to cover your service hours, which is a scheduling question rather than a location one. Agree the coverage window before the engagement starts rather than after. If you run after-hours or weekend emergency cover, say so early, because it changes who is a fit.
Yours. The role is defined by working inside your existing field service platform, phone system and customer records rather than introducing anything new. Proficiency in the specific platform is part of what we screen for.
No, although the roles overlap at the edges. A customer service assistant handles inbound contact - answering, booking, updating, resolving. A service coordinator owns a body of scheduled work and its documentation over time. If your problem is that the phone is not answered well, that is customer service. If your problem is that committed work is not being delivered, that is coordination.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
There is a category of work in every construction business that never appears on a schedule and never gets assigned to anyone. It just lands. Someone chases the supplier. Someone updates the log. Someone remembers the permit expires. Usually that someone is whoever is least able to say no, which in a lot of companies is the owner.
None of it is difficult. That is precisely why it is expensive. Work that is easy but constant absorbs the hours of people whose time should be going somewhere else, and because no single task feels significant, nobody ever adds it up.
The list below is that work. Twenty-five tasks, grouped by where they sit in the business, that construction companies routinely hand to a remote team member.
You are not meant to delegate all of them. You are meant to read the list and recognise the four or five that are currently eating your week.
The pattern here is that measurement and administration consume most of an estimator's week while scope judgment, the part only they can do, gets whatever is left. Moving the first does not dilute the second.
Closeout is worth singling out. It is the work most often deferred and most expensive to reconstruct six months later when a client asks for a warranty document nobody filed. If most of this group currently lands on your project managers, read before you hire another project manager.
The recurring failure in this group is not accuracy. It is timeliness. Books that are ninety days behind are a historical record, not a management tool, and no amount of accuracy fixes that.
That last one is quietly the highest-leverage item on the list for service-oriented contractors. Most negative reviews are not about workmanship. They are about nobody calling.
A list of twenty-five is useful for recognition and useless for action. Narrowing it takes two passes.
First, mark what recurs. Go through and mark anything that happens weekly or more. One-off work is not a role, and building a position around it produces someone with nothing to do in a normal week.
Second, mark what a senior person is doing. Anything on the list currently being done by an owner, a project manager or an estimator is worth more than its apparent cost, because the real price is whatever that person is not doing instead.
The items with both marks are your first role. Usually there are four or five, they cluster in one area, and together they describe a position clearly enough to recruit against.
What you should not do is hand over a scattered handful across all four groups. That produces a person who is busy in every direction and accountable for nothing, which is the single most common way these arrangements fail.
For the sake of a complete answer, the boundary matters as much as the list.
Before scoping anything, do one piece of arithmetic. Take the tasks you marked in both passes and estimate the hours they consume in a normal week. Multiply by the loaded cost of whoever is doing them now.
That figure is what the current arrangement costs, and it is almost always larger than people expect, because it has never been counted as a line item. It is spread across evenings, weekends and the parts of the week that were supposed to go to winning work.
Whatever you decide after that is a decision. What most companies have today is not a decision. It is an accumulation.
Four or five that cluster in one area, rather than a scattered handful across the business. A clustered group describes a position clearly enough to recruit against and gives the person a defined piece of the operation to own. Scattered tasks produce someone who is always busy and accountable for nothing.
Three tests. Does it recur weekly or more, can you write down the task, the inputs and what finished looks like, and does it happen on a screen. Work that clears all three transfers cleanly. Work that fails one will fail after you hire.
That is the intended setup, working in your platform rather than exchanging files by email. Which platforms the role requires is agreed before recruiting begins, and candidates are screened against that requirement.
Roles can be part time or full time depending on what the work actually requires, and the schedule is agreed while the position is being defined. Starting part time with a clearly defined scope works better than starting full time with a vague one.
Quantity takeoffs and estimating administration, because bid volume outgrows estimating capacity earlier than most contractors expect, and because the measurable part of preconstruction separates cleanly from the judgment part.
Within a maximum of approximately two weeks we can normally present two to three pre-screened candidates who meet the requirements of the position and are ready to be interviewed. The final hiring time depends mainly on how quickly your own evaluation and decision process moves.
