You've given a price. Now what?
You price a few jobs in the evening and send them out. What happens next — chasing, waiting, hearing a reason — decides whether it becomes work. Nermio is the list of what's open, updated at the end of the day at the laptop. There is no phone app.
How it goes now
You're the estimator, the salesman and the planner, usually in that order after five o'clock.
- Enquiries arrive by phone, by message, by email and sometimes through someone on site. So they sit in four places.
- You've given nine prices in three weeks and can't remember whether you chased four of them.
- A homeowner who asked for a price in May rings in September after all. You no longer know what you quoted.
- When you lose work you hear "it was a bit too high", or nothing. You have no idea whether you're consistently too dear or just too slow to reply.
- In season you have no time to sell, and in the quiet months you should have rung three months earlier.
What makes this work different
Many prices given, some become work, and the difference is in the chasing.
Your problem isn't too little demand. It's that every price takes hours to work out and then drops out of sight. Chasing once raises the odds of it becoming work more than winning one extra enquiry does, and chasing is free.
The second thing is that your existing customers have maintenance and repeat work. Whoever you sold an installation to three years ago is a service visit this year and a replacement in seven. That isn't cold selling, it's a date someone has to remember.
What Nermio does about it
Four things. The last is why this trade gets the most out of it.
An enquiry comes in
Company or homeowner in, with what they asked for in two lines. The enquiries from the phone, the messages and the email end up on one list, and that alone stops one slipping through.
The price has gone out
The deal moves to the quote stage ("Offerte") and gets a task straight away: ring in ten days. Your chase is then no longer a good intention but a line on your Today screen.
It stays quiet
Deals standing still sit together on the Today screen. In a busy spell that's the list you'd otherwise only draw up once the work dries up, and by then you're six weeks late.
The job goes to someone else
When you mark a deal lost, Nermio asks why: too expensive, too late, the customer chose another, it didn't go ahead. After thirty of them you see the breakdown, and that is the only hard fact about your mark-up and your response time you can get without guessing.
How to keep it up without setting time aside
Ten minutes at the end of the day, not on the move.
Nermio isn't built for filling things in on scaffolding. The habit that does hold: at the end of the day, the new enquiries in, the prices that have gone out moved to the right stage, and the three people you spoke to noted briefly. That's a few minutes, and it works because you do it in one go rather than ten times in between.
If you work with a regular set of subcontractors or self-employed tradespeople who also talk to customers, you can just add them. Your team costs nothing extra, because the price is per company.
What Nermio doesn't do here
There's no phone app. Nermio runs in a browser and is meant for the laptop.
There's no link to estimating or planning software. Your calculations stay in the package you use now; Nermio only records that the price has gone out and what came back. Invoicing is in there, including the Dutch reverse charge (btw verlegd), where a subcontractor invoices without VAT and the main contractor accounts for it. The VAT rules it knows are Dutch ones: 0, 9 and 21 per cent, and the statutory wording on the PDF is Dutch, not HMRC's.
There's no job-sheet or planning module, and you can't lay out a quote document in it.
You can't import your open prices. The CSV import under Settings covers companies and contacts; deals and tasks you enter yourself, and with a few dozen enquiries that's the quickest start anyway.
Start with the prices that are open now
Put them in with a date to chase and see what happens in two weeks. No credit card, and you're not tied to anything.