Electrical Estimate Handoff: What the Office Needs Before Follow-Up

3. Make status, version, and ownership visible

A single “open” status hides too much. The office needs to see whether an estimate is still a draft, has been sent, is waiting for a response, has a question pending, has a change request, has been approved, has been converted to a job, or is closed.

Vendor systems already separate some of those states. In Jobber, a newly saved quote starts as a Draft, which has not been sent and is visible only internally. The status changes to Awaiting Response when the quote is sent by email or text, or when it is marked awaiting response. Jobber also documents Changes Requested, Approved, Converted, and Archived statuses. A draft is not proof of delivery: Jobber states that draft quotes are not visible to clients, and that once a quote has been sent, it cannot be returned to draft.

Those status names matter because they change what the customer can see and what the office should do next. In Jobber, a quote in Changes Requested is no longer visible in Client Hub until the company amends and resends it, or marks it Awaiting Response again. If an approved quote’s total, line items, or related terms are edited, Jobber removes the client’s signature from the quote and saves the previous signed version as an internal PDF note; the Approved status may remain, so a new signature requires a deliberate resend. Converted is a final status even if the linked job is later deleted.

ServiceTitan documents a similar distinction between sending, viewing, signing, and selling. Official alerts include Customer Viewed Online Estimate, Customer Signed Online Estimate, Sold Estimate, and Email Delivery Failed, which fires when an email status moves from Sent to Dropped, Bounced, or Failed. Viewing is not the same as signing, and a send attempt is not the same as delivery.

Give every live estimate one owner and one due action. Stop following up on a superseded version, a converted job, a recorded decline, or a record that was never actually delivered. If two versions exist, the status must say which version the customer is considering.

4. Treat vendor events as signals, then check the record

Estimate tools can notify the office when something changes. That is useful, and it is not the whole workflow.

ServiceTitan’s documentation lets you set email or text alerts when an online estimate is viewed or signed, when an estimate is sold, and when an estimate email fails to deliver. Jobber notifies admin users in the activity feed and by push notification when a quote is approved, and it can email a designated team member when a client requests changes. Jobber’s developer documentation also describes webhooks whose payload identifies the event topic, the account, and the affected record, but not the full object; an application has to query the current quote details. Jobber also states that webhook delivery is at-least-once, so the same event may arrive more than once and should be handled idempotently.

Use those events to create or update a task: confirm delivery, route a question, start follow-up, or convert an approved estimate into an operations handoff. Do not treat a notification as proof that the office already has a complete site record, that the customer received the current version, or that a technical question has been answered by the right person.

If you send quotes or reminders by text, confirm the consent and opt-out process with your counsel before automating those messages. A phone call or an in-person visit is not, by itself, a complete consent record.

5. Close the loop into scheduling, or into a final status

When a customer approves an estimate, the handoff is not finished. The operations record should identify the approved version, the acceptance or signature under company policy, any deposit status your process requires, the scheduling owner, and the field notes, parts, permit, access, or inspection constraints already captured on site.

Jobber’s documented next step after approval is to convert the quote to a job from the approved line items. ServiceTitan documents that a customer can review and sign an online estimate, and that the job audit trail can show the estimate as sent, sold, and signed. Whatever system you use, the office should be able to see which version was accepted and who owns the work now.

A decline or a closed record should keep the reason in the customer’s words when they offer one. Do not invent a reason, and do not keep the estimate in an active follow-up queue.

The same ownership idea applies earlier in the process. See plumbing lead response automation for how to turn inbound requests into one owned callback task.