The Portal: The Software You Run the Business On

Ask any franchisor in this category what software you get, and you will usually be told the name of a third-party platform with the brand’s logo on the login screen. We went a different way, and the reason is worth explaining because it tells you something about how the rest of the system was built.

In the company’s early years the call volume made it obvious that managing customers, quotes and orders on paper was not going to work. We looked at the obvious options at the time: Maximizer, Microsoft Project, Salesforce, Basecamp and others. Every one of them was rejected for the same set of reasons. None was a complete solution, so we would have run three or four programs and stitched them together. Each brought a tool set built for businesses far larger than ours, which meant a cluttered interface and a long learning curve for people whose actual job is renovating kitchens. And at that time most of them were not cloud based, which is close to useless for a company that works out of vans.

So we built The Portal. Development started in late 2011 and it went live in January 2012. It has been the system of record for this business ever since, and it has been extended continuously as the business found new things it needed. It is cloud based, it runs on a managed server in a data centre, and it works on anything with a browser and a connection: laptop in the office, tablet in the van, phone on a job site.

The practical consequence of building it ourselves is simple. When a franchisee needs something changed, we change it. We are not filing a feature request with a vendor and waiting for a roadmap.

One system carries a job from the first phone call to the final invoice. There is no export step, no second program, and no spreadsheet holding the part that matters.

Quoting, which is where trades businesses actually fail

Most independent renovation businesses do not fail from lack of work. They fail from quoting jobs that lose money and not finding out until the job is over.

The Portal prices a job on three things: labour, materials, and risk. You build the job out day by day, saying what gets done, how many Master and Junior handyman hours it takes, and what materials, disposal, permits and sub-trades each day needs. Alongside that you flag the conditions that make a job harder than it looks: a condo with elevator bookings and no parking, a multi-unit building, structural work. Each of those carries a premium, because they cost real hours that a straight labour-and-materials estimate never captures.

The system then shows you two numbers side by side: the price it calculated from the plan, and the price you actually set for the customer. If those two diverge by more than 10 percent, The Portal will not convert the quote into an order.

That guardrail exists for one reason above all others: the missing zero. Price a kitchen at $30,000, type $3,000 on the quote, send it. Every renovation business has that story, and in most of them the contract is signed before anyone notices. Here the system stops before it can happen.

There is also a quick estimator for the phone call version, when a customer wants a rough number for two days of work before anyone books a site visit.

Watching a job’s budget while it is still running

Every order has an efficiency view that compares what was planned against what has actually been spent and collected, in real time, with anything over budget shown in red. Labour is drawn from the schedule and materials from what has been logged, so it updates itself as the job runs rather than at the end.

This is the difference between finding out a job went wrong on the Tuesday it went wrong, and finding out six weeks later when the invoice is reconciled.

Scheduling, payroll and sub-trades

The schedule assigns people to jobs in half-hour blocks, and because each person’s pay rate is attached to their scheduled hours, the labour cost of a job builds itself. Every two weeks The Portal totals the hours and produces the payroll run.

Sub-contractors live in a searchable directory filed by trade, each with a one to five rating, so the next person who needs an electrician on a Friday afternoon can see what happened last time. The system generates the contractor-to-contractor agreements too.

The paperwork writes itself

Quotes, work orders, contracts and the customer expectations document all generate as PDFs. Contracts carry the right payment schedule for the size and shape of the job, from paid-on-completion through to a fifty percent deposit where materials are special order and cannot be returned.

Work orders sent to the crew deliberately carry no prices, and include the shopping list for the day with items already purchased checked off.

Reporting a franchise buyer should ask about

Anyone can show you a dashboard. These are the reports that change decisions:

• Invoice profitability. Planned labour and materials against actual, per invoice. It filters by project manager, which is how you coach someone rather than guess about them.
• Market analysis. Every marketing source with its quote count, closing ratio by both count and dollar value, and sales per contact. You find out which channels are worth money rather than which ones feel busy.
• Invoice timeline. Days from inquiry to quote, quote to deposit, deposit to start, start to invoice. Slow points in a business usually hide in one of those gaps.
• Failed quotes, with reasons. Every quote that did not convert, with the reason recorded, so a pattern shows up as a pattern.
• Customer satisfaction surveys. A seventeen-question survey goes out automatically when a job is invoiced, and a shorter one when a quote is lost. Results are scored and tied back to the quoter and the project manager on that job.
• Expense audit. The system reviews card and account activity and flags anything irregular by severity. Loss prevention is not a comfortable topic in a business with vans, cards and hardware stores, and it is better handled by software than by suspicion.
• Income statement, generated from the general ledger. Your accountant still files your taxes, but you are not waiting on them to know how the month went.

What this means if you have never run a trades business

Every night at midnight The Portal turns the day’s communication log into a to-do list. Items not dealt with by end of day turn red, and that is tracked. It is a small thing that describes the whole system: it does not just record what happened, it tells you what has not been done yet.

That is why no construction experience is required to own a HandyForce franchise. The system already knows how work should be priced, sequenced, scheduled and chased. Your job is running the business and managing the people, and the training that comes with your setup covers both.

What it costs

Portal setup is $5,000 at signing, which covers building and populating your database and the initial training on the system as part of your franchise training. After that it is $250 per month for maintenance, support and future upgrades. There is no percentage-of-sales technology fee layered on top of the royalty, which is worth checking against any other brand you are considering. See the full investment breakdown.