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Every estimate gets a follow-up, without you remembering

Three days after a proposal goes out with no reply, a follow-up is drafted for you — the actual scope, the actual number, the actual name. You read it, change what you want, and hit send.

Start freeSee how it works

Proposals sent — still no reply

5 waiting

  • Dana Whitfield

    Kitchen remodel — 412 Ridgeline Dr · $48,500

    4 days

  • Marco Reyes

    Basement finish — 88 Halloway Ave · $38,200

    6 days

  • Priya Tan

    Deck rebuild and rail — 27 Coldbrook · $14,900

    3 days

  • Joanne Carrick

    Primary bath — 1140 Ester St · $22,400

    2 days

Three are past the three-day mark. Two of them will be someone else's job by Friday.

Works with

  • Gmail
  • Outlook
  • Google Sheets
  • Google Calendar
  • QuickBooks

It reads the proposal threads in the inbox you already send from. There's no separate estimating tool to adopt and nothing for your customers to log into.

The chore

How this goes right now

  1. You walk the job, take your measurements, and spend an evening putting the numbers together. The proposal goes out Monday morning with the allowances spelled out and a hold date on the price. Then the week happens — a framing inspection, a tile delivery that shows up short, someone's truck in the shop — and Monday's proposal drops off the end of your list.

  2. Two weeks later you're going through old threads looking for something else and there it is. You don't remember whether the price still holds, whether the cabinet lead time you quoted is still real, or whether they went with someone else in the meantime. So the follow-up you finally send is vague, because writing a specific one means reopening the file and re-reading your own scope.

  3. The homeowner, meanwhile, got three estimates. Two of you never followed up.

The difference

The difference is whether the follow-up gets written at all

Following up when you remember
Following up on a schedule
Proposals go quiet and nobody notices for a fortnight
Silence past three days gets caught the next morning
The follow-up is generic because re-reading the scope takes twenty minutes
The draft already quotes the scope, the number and the allowances
Price hold dates and lead times quietly go stale
The hold date and lead times get restated while they're still true
No idea which estimates are still live and which are dead
One tracker showing sent, replied, followed up and gone cold
Second follow-ups basically never happen
A second nudge gets drafted a week later if it's still quiet

Try it

Walk through it yourself

This is the actual shape of the workflow — the same trigger, the same steps, the same draft waiting for your say-so. Click through it.

Chase unanswered estimates

Scheduled checkGmail

No reply for four days

The proposal for the Whitfield kitchen went out Monday at 9:12am. Nothing on the thread since. The morning check picked it up.

What it does

  1. Look through every proposal thread from the last 30 days

    14 sent, 9 replied, 5 sitting quiet — and 3 of those are now past the three-day mark.

    Gmail

  2. Pull the job details out of your estimate tracker

    Whitfield kitchen remodel, 412 Ridgeline Dr — $48,500, sent 14 Apr, tile and fixture allowances still open, no deposit taken.

    Google Sheets

  3. Check what you could actually offer them

    Thursday 8–10am is open, and Friday after 1pm.

    Google Calendar

  4. Draft the follow-up against the real scope

    Restates the number and the hold date, flags the cabinet lead time, and offers the two slots that are genuinely free.

    Gmail

Draft email — nothing has been sent

To
Dana Whitfield
Subject
Re: Kitchen remodel proposal — 412 Ridgeline Dr

Hi Dana — following up on the proposal I sent Monday for the kitchen. Wanted to make sure it came through alright and see whether you had questions on any of it.

One thing worth flagging on timing: cabinets are running about six weeks out at the moment, so if you're still aiming to be finished before the end of summer we'd want that order placed by the end of the month. The $48,500 holds through 15 May.

The tile and fixture allowances are still open in that number. If you've picked anything out since we walked it, send it over and I can firm those up instead of leaving them as allowances — usually that moves the total one way or the other by a couple of thousand.

Happy to walk it again if that's easier. I've got Thursday morning or Friday afternoon open this week.

Whitfield-kitchen-proposal-r2.pdf

Send this to Dana Whitfield?

Change the wording, move the hold date, offer different times, or bin it entirely. It sits in your drafts until you decide. Nothing leaves your inbox on its own.

Once you approveGoogle Sheets

It sends from your inbox and the tracker catches up

The follow-up goes out from your own Gmail so the reply lands where you'd expect. The Whitfield row moves to 'followed up 18 Apr', and if it's still quiet a week later, a second, shorter nudge gets drafted.

That's the whole workflow.

It drafts, you approve, nothing sends on its own.

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How it works

What it's actually doing

Four steps, all of them against accounts you already have.

  1. 1
    • Gmail
    • OuOutlook

    It watches the threads you already send proposals on

    Every morning it looks at proposal threads from the last 30 days in Gmail or Outlook and works out which ones have had no reply. It reads the thread, so a reply that came from a spouse on a different address still counts as a reply.

  2. 2
    • Google Sheets
    • ExExcel
    • QuickBooks

    It pulls the job details rather than guessing them

    The price, the date sent, what's an allowance and what's fixed — those come out of your estimate tracker in Google Sheets or Excel, or off the estimate itself in QuickBooks. The follow-up quotes real numbers because it's reading the real record.

  3. 3
    • Google Calendar

    It only offers times you actually have

    Before suggesting a walkthrough it checks your calendar for genuinely free slots, so you're not offering Thursday morning to a homeowner while you're committed to a framing inspection.

  4. 4
    • Gmail
    • Google Sheets

    It writes the draft and stops

    The draft lands in your drafts folder with the attachment on it. You read it, change it if you want, and send. Then the tracker row updates and the next check is scheduled.

You stay in control

It drafts. You send. Nothing goes to a customer on its own.

The thing you're worried about is it emailing a homeowner something wrong with your name on it. So it doesn't send. Every follow-up waits in your drafts until you've read it and pressed send yourself.

  1. Step one

    It drafts

  2. Step two — you

    You read it and approve

  3. Step three

    Only then does it send

Drafts, not sends

The default is that it writes and stops. You can leave it that way forever — plenty of contractors do, because reading a draft takes fifteen seconds and undoing a bad email takes a week.

You see what it saw

Each draft shows the numbers it pulled and where from — the tracker row, the estimate, the thread. If it's got the price wrong you'll spot it before the customer does, not after.

Killing one is one click

If a job's already dead, or you spoke to them on the phone yesterday and it never made the thread, you bin the draft and it stops chasing that one.

It never invents a number

If the tracker has no price on a job, the draft says so and leaves it out rather than filling the gap. A follow-up that quotes the wrong figure is worse than no follow-up.

Setup

What setting this up involves

  1. 1

    Connect

    • Gmail or Outlook — whichever you send proposals from
    • The Google Sheet or Excel file you track estimates in, or your QuickBooks company
    • Your calendar, if you want it offering walkthrough times
  2. 2

    Tell it how you work

    • How long silence should run before it chases — three days is the usual answer
    • What a proposal looks like in your inbox, so it can tell one from a supplier email
    • How you talk to customers, roughly — it'll match the tone of proposals you've already sent
    • Whether to draft a second nudge, and how long after the first
  3. 3

    Then it runs

    About 20 minutes, once

    Most of that is pointing it at the right spreadsheet columns. After that it runs every morning and you only hear from it when there's something to read.

Edge cases

Where it's careful, and what it won't do

What it handles

  • A reply that isn't really a reply

    An out-of-office or a one-line 'got it, will look this week' doesn't count as the job moving. It reads what came back and keeps the job on the list, but pushes the next chase out so you're not nagging someone who answered you.

  • Revised proposals

    If you send a revision, the clock restarts on the new one. It follows up on the current number, not the one you superseded three weeks ago.

  • Jobs that are dead but nobody said so

    After the second unanswered nudge it stops chasing and marks the job cold on the tracker rather than sending a third. There's a difference between persistent and irritating.

  • The price hold expiring

    If the hold date on your tracker has already passed, it won't restate a number as if it still stands. The draft asks whether they'd like it repriced instead.

What it does not do

  • It doesn't write the estimate

    Takeoff, pricing and markup stay yours. This picks up after the proposal is already out the door.

  • It doesn't negotiate

    If a homeowner comes back asking you to sharpen the pencil, that lands in your inbox as a normal reply. It won't discount anything or answer a pricing question for you.

  • It doesn't call or text

    This runs on email. If your follow-up game is really a phone call, this drafts the email version and you can still make the call.

  • It doesn't touch signed work

    Once a job's accepted it drops off the chase list entirely. Chasing a customer who already said yes is how you look disorganised.

Time back

Three to five hours a month

Time back
Three to five hours a month
Spent on
The work that bills
What it costs
$19 / monthStarterplan — see what’s included

How that’s worked out: Based on 12–20 proposals a month, roughly 10 minutes each to reopen the file, re-read the scope and write a specific follow-up — plus the second nudges that currently don't get written at all. The saving is the writing time; the point is the jobs you stop losing to silence.

Fair questions

The things contractors ask first

Won't a chased customer feel pestered?

One follow-up at three days and one more a week later is roughly what a good salesperson does, and well short of what most homeowners expect. The draft references their actual job rather than reading like a template, which is the difference between a nudge and spam. After the second, it stops.

My estimates aren't in a spreadsheet, they're just emailed PDFs.

That works, though it's thinner. It can pull the date and the customer off the thread and follow up on that alone. You'd lose the price, the hold date and the allowance detail from the draft — which is most of what makes the follow-up worth reading, so it's worth putting a simple tracker in place first.

What if it sends something with the wrong price on it?

It can't send. The draft sits in your drafts folder showing which tracker row it read the number from, and you press send. If the number's wrong, it's wrong on your tracker too — and you've just found that out before the customer did.

More construction chores

Other things that keep falling off the list

The same job in other trades and industries

FAQ

Questions worth answering properly

How does it know an estimate hasn't been answered?

It reads the thread the proposal went out on. If nobody has replied on that thread since you sent it, the estimate counts as unanswered. Replies from a different address on the same thread — a spouse, an assistant — still register, so you don't chase someone who already got back to you.

Does it send the follow-up automatically?

No. It writes the draft and stops. The email sits in your drafts until you read it and press send. You can change any of it first, or delete it. Nothing reaches a customer without you doing that.

Can it follow up more than once?

Yes. The usual setup is a first follow-up at three days and a second, shorter one about a week after that. Once that second one has gone unanswered it stops chasing and marks the job cold on your tracker rather than sending a third.

Does this work with Outlook, or only Gmail?

Both. It reads threads and creates drafts in either. Same for the tracker — Google Sheets or an Excel file on OneDrive both work, and it can read estimate details out of QuickBooks if that's where you write them.

What happens if the customer replies while a draft is waiting?

The draft gets pulled before you send it by mistake. A reply landing means the job is moving, so it comes off the chase list and the tracker row updates.

Does it need my customers to use anything?

No. They get a normal email from your normal address and reply to it the way they always have. There's nothing for them to log into and no sign they're not reading something you typed.

Stop losing jobs to silence

Connect the inbox you send proposals from and your estimate tracker. The first drafts show up the next morning.

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