In today's fast-paced construction industry, roofing contractors face numerous challenges in managing their projects efficiently. From keeping track of estimates to scheduling teams and following up with clients, the complexities can quickly become overwhelming. This article will guide you through setting up a streamlined workflow in ClickUp, specifically tailored for roofing contractors.
The Challenge
Many roofing contractors struggle with:
- Missing follow-ups with potential clients
- Losing track of project statuses
- Inefficient team scheduling
These issues can lead to lost revenue, unhappy clients, and unnecessary stress. But with the right project management tool and setup, these problems can become a thing of the past.
The Solution: ClickUp for Roofing Projects
Let's walk through setting up a client project workflow in ClickUp that addresses these common pain points.
Step 1: Create a Dedicated Space and Folder
Start by creating a new space or folder in ClickUp specifically for your roofing clients. This keeps all your project information organized and easily accessible.
Step 2: Set Up Custom Statuses
Create custom statuses that reflect your project lifecycle:
1. Estimate Needed
2. Estimate Sent
3. Project Approved
4. Scheduled
5. In Progress
6. Completed
7. Follow-up
These statuses will help you quickly visualize where each project stands.
Step 3: Add Custom Fields
Enhance your tasks with custom fields to capture important project details:
- Client Name (use this as the task name)
- Contact Number
- Project Value
- Start Date
- Estimated Completion Date (use the due date field)
Step 4: Create a Task Template
Develop a checklist template for new projects that includes common subtasks:
- Schedule site visit
- Prepare estimate
- Send estimate to client
- Follow up on estimate
- Schedule project
- Order materials
- Complete project
- Send invoice
- Follow up for feedback
This template ensures consistency across all your projects and saves time when setting up new jobs.
Step 5: Utilize Board View
Switch to the Board view to visualize your projects based on their status. This gives you a quick overview of all ongoing projects and their current stages.
Step 6: Set Up Automation
Create a simple automation to streamline your workflow:
- Trigger: When a task moves to "Project Approved"
- Action: Apply the project template checklist
This automation ensures that all necessary steps are added to the task as soon as a project is approved, reducing manual work and the risk of missing important steps.
Bringing It All Together
With this setup, you'll have a centralized system for managing all your roofing projects. You can easily track the status of each job, access important client information, and ensure no steps are missed in your process.
The Board view provides a visual representation of your workflow, allowing you to quickly identify bottlenecks or projects that need attention. The custom fields give you instant access to crucial project details, while the automated checklist ensures consistency across all your jobs.
Conclusion
By implementing this ClickUp workflow, roofing contractors can significantly improve their project management process. You'll reduce missed follow-ups, keep better track of project statuses, and schedule your teams more efficiently. This leads to happier clients, increased revenue, and a smoother operation overall.
Remember, the key to success with any project management tool is consistency in use and continuous refinement of your process. As you use this ClickUp setup, you may find ways to further customize it to your specific needs. Don't hesitate to make adjustments that work best for your roofing business.
Start implementing this workflow today, and watch as your project management headaches become a thing of the past!
Video Transcript:
00:00 Hello, on today's how-to for ClickUp, we're going to set up for a construction contractor how to manage their client projects.
00:10 So, the scenario today is a roofing contractor is struggling to keep track of projects from the initial estimate to final completion.
00:17 They're missing follow-ups with potential clients. Not good. Losing track of project statuses. Also not good. And failing to schedule teams efficiently.
00:26 Also really bad. So, the solution is we're going to set up a client project. And we're going to go step-through-step how to do that.
00:34 Again, why should you listen to me? I'm Jed. I'm the founder of Hydrant. As far as what I do, I live, eat, sleep, and breathe project management.
00:45 I'm the founder of Hydrant. And I'm expert vetted on Upwork, which means top 1%. I've led over 50 projects in my career.
00:53 Probably closer to 70 at this point. I have a certification from Stanford University for advanced project management. And over 15 years ago, I've been And experience. We do a lot of work around setting up ClickUp for clients, as well as running software projects and, uh, staffing project managers.
01:08 So let's get into it. Next, let's first start with creating a space in ClickUp for us. So I'm going to use this template space that I have here, and I'm going to add a new folder.
01:19 And we're going to call it roofing clients. And I'm just gonna go I'm gonna start with here, but actually, you know what?
01:31 Let's go ahead and set up our custom statuses. Um, and let's start here with estimate needed. This is not started.
01:41 Estimate sent. Um, let's add whoops. And you're gonna see my mistakes too. So that's good. And then let's add project approved.
01:57 Maybe that feels like a, that feels like it's active. As opposed to not started. So let's put a project approved here because if it's approved, then, you know, maybe they've paid a deposit or something like that.
02:10 It's kind of like actually going to happen. Let's do in progress, completed, and then follow up. I like follow up.
02:21 That's going to be a good one. I think, um, I'm going to move this to done. Um, and in fact, I'm going to move completed to done as well.
02:31 And, uh, we'll talk about done versus closed at some point here. I'm going to hit, uh, apply changes. And I'm going to go ahead and hit create.
02:44 Cool. So now we've got our folder here for roofing clients with some custom statuses. So you can see estimate needed here.
02:52 It's going to X out of that. Okay. Now what do we want each feel, what each task to look like?
02:59 So I think, uh, I think the task name is going to be the client name. I like that. So if we go back to here, we kind of got this done.
03:10 We got statuses and client projects done. Let's strike that out. Now we're going to add some custom fields. So like, what does our task actually need to be?
03:16 And I like the idea of client name. That's like the job title. So I'm going to do, um, a friend of mine.
03:24 Let's do Tyler Vale. This is the name of the job. Good job. And then, um, we need a contact number.
03:33 So I'm going to create a custom field for that. And we've got this phone number field, which is nice. Client, uh, contact number.
03:44 It creates. So that's shown up. Let's put that here. And uh, let's do 0800 508 9999. That seems like a fun one.
03:59 Okay. And then, uh, we're going to value. Okay. This is a great one. I like knowing the size of my project.
04:06 So this is a really small project. Great. Project value. That's money. Create type. And these values are important because if you integrate with other surfaces or, you know, there's, there's always kind of like a good reason for having, um, a specific, uh, field type because that'll help you refer back
04:28 to other parts of your or click up setup. Effectively, if you're concerned about like long term viability and click up, you're like, oh, I don't know.
04:36 We're probably going to, we're going to grow so fast over the next year that we out grow click up. Um, then you can use, um, always just use text fields, simple text fields.
04:46 So that can be, uh, if you're concerned about that project value. Okay. This is a roofing client. So I don't know how much a roof costs.
04:52 Let's say like, I don't know. Eighty five hundred dollars. And then a start date. That seems useful. We have a due date.
05:01 . Eighty. Oh, but we need a start date. So let's go to, in start date, I believe is a custom, or is not a custom field.
05:09 It should just be a regular field. So in that case, we just want to show, um, the start date. Okay.
05:18 I'm going to hit that. And I kind of went through that quickly. But, uh, again, if you hit plus, you can add fields.
05:27 And you can go that way. I just realized I am in the folder as opposed to the list. So let's go to the list.
05:32 Oh, no. It looks different. So whenever you're in a folder, you're looking at all the lists inside. And right now we really want to be in the list.
05:42 But no problem. I'm just going to go back here. And it should have those fields. So oh my gosh, we have so many different fields here.
05:51 Um, contact phone. Let's add that. Um, client name is going to be the name of the task. I'm ask. And then project value.
06:05 I'm going to always search, which is nice. Let's add that. And then start date, we already have that as a field.
06:12 So we're just going to go to one of these hidden fields and hit start date. And then estimated completion date, we're going to just use due date.
06:20 How about that? So, oh, but I'm missing the phone number. Unless I already have that here. Okay, I got that here.
06:28 Okay, I'm going to make these smaller just so we can see a little bit better. . . . We got due date. And you know what?
06:33 I'm going to remove priority. Priority is nice, but it's kind of like, you want the simplest view possible here. So we got the phone number.
06:40 Uh, okay. Let's put that in again. Oops. And then we got this here. Umm. Let's say we're going to, okay, let's put start date in front of due date.
06:57 And then assignee. Do we really need assignee? Yeah, I think we might. so We might want to assign this to a crew.
07:04 If we don't want to use individuals, we could create a custom field around crews. So that could be interesting. Um, well, let's say this is going to start on the 21st and this is going to end roof.
07:15 How long does it take? Maybe 10 days. Okay, let's put the 30th. Probably don't want to be roofing in October, but there you go.
07:22 Okay, so now we've got the setup. So Tyler's in here and you can actually have the setup. So like, if you had a form, uh, from your website or from your CRM, you could actually create a create, uh, a new form as an input form or like a contact form and that could actually populate into here, where we
07:40 have an estimate here. So, alright, so let's go back to our agenda. So we've got the custom fields going. Next we want to create a task template for new projects and include some common sub-tasks.
07:51 Okay, so I'm going to copy this. You're going to love this. Okay, so we're going to go in here. And what I'm going to do is go into action items.
08:00 I don't love sub-tasks. I like to use like having a checklist and I'm going to copy paste and see it's going to detect multiple lines.
08:07 Create checklist from items. Oh, I love that. Okay. And let's rename this, um, project roofing project template checklist. Cool. And then what I'm going to do, I could save this actually as a template.
08:27 So, um, let's do that just for fun. Roofing project . In contractor. And I always date my templates. Because when you have a lot of them and you don't clean them out, it's nice to see when you did it.
08:43 Okay. So now we saved that. Okay. So, and this is cool because it tracks how many of the things have been done in the checklist.
08:52 So. Now, um, we're in list. Okay, so let's see. Go back to our agenda. and uh Okay, we got a task template for new projects includes comments.
09:05 So we could have done it with subtasks. I like it with checklist. It's really like a problem with subtasks is they get lost.
09:12 And especially if you do multiple layers of subtasks, you're gonna get even more lost. So I think it's like, um, shout out to Cody Schneider.
09:19 I'm trying to make this as good a video as possible. Anyways, um, try to do subtasks. Like you can play with subtasks, but I just think they get lost.
09:27 Um, sometimes you can, you can do down to six levels if you enable the click app. Yeah. you can have six layers of subtasks, maybe you want to do that.
09:34 Maybe you're a smart sheets guy or microside project person lady and you want to have all those layers of tasks.
09:41 You can do it that way, so. But I don't like it because it gets lost. Um, and then now what I'm gonna do.
09:51 Is let's go back here. And what I want to do is this estimates in here and I just for fun.
09:58 I'm gonna duplicate this task. I'm going to create a new one. . . . um, on dreus, or a witz. Just for fun.
10:07 Duplicate. Okay, that's here. And, and let's say, um, you know, Tyler, we have an estimate. We have a value, I should say, um, we have dates.
10:19 So I'm gonna actually move this task to scheduled. Okay. So now it's showing and scheduled. And okay, but, but don't worry I want to see, like, top down, like, scheduled is already happening.
10:35 So maybe we want to show it differently. Okay, I'm gonna hit status, and I'm gonna go descending instead. And, clickups always gonna ask if you want to save your changes.
10:43 Let's go ahead and hit save. Because I like seeing, kind of like, earlier in the pipeline, I want to see up here, and later in the pipeline, I want to see down below.
10:52 For some reason that works for my head. Okay, so let's say this one, we don't have a date. We don't have a value.
11:00 So let's delete that. and let's actually delete the checklist, because I just want to show you an automation. And I'm going to quickly set up an automation.
11:13 So as it takes a minute. And what I'm gonna do is, this automation rule is here in templates, roofing clients.
11:20 It's just located here. And when, I want, when the status changes to estimate, umm, actually, want to . I think let's do project proofed.
11:34 Umm, actually note, let's do from not started. No, confirm. Two. Project approved. So when it gets work flowed, status moves to work project proof.
11:52 Then what I want it to do, is I want to apply a template. And we've got all these templates. Where's the one that I just, uhm, last made.
12:02 I can't see it for some reason. Sometimes it takes a minute when you save templates. Umm, but it'll, it should show up.
12:19 Um, let's say, let's just use this prop, this project management one just for fun. It's going to apply template. And ideally we would have.
12:31 have our template already loaded in there. But sometimes templates take a few hours to like replicate across all the databases that click up.
12:38 So, umm, that's what's probably going on there. Um, and then I'm going to go ahead and hit create. And I can always change it.
12:44 It's easy once you kind of get the hang of this. So now what happens is we need an estimate. Let's say we get an estimate.
12:54 Okay, this one's going to be 5870. Now I want to workflow this to project approved. approved. And what it should do, and sometimes it takes a minute.
13:07 But it's going to actually automatically add that checklist. So let's go in it. Let's see what happened. Oh, we had this check.
13:18 We had this set up for subtasks. So what it did is it added all these as subtasks. And now they're all here.
13:24 So that's kind of cool. Um, now let's see right now, maybe we don't like this, uh, this list view. Right now they're kind of grouped in state.
13:32 That is, maybe you like a board view. Um, let's just do that really quick. If I hit board, this is a default view.
13:39 Now we can see all these different cards and when they're scheduled. And you could organize this based on date. You can obviously move these around.
13:47 Um, but that's kind of like a different way we could use the board. Okay, so hopefully that was helpful. And not too long.
13:54 We kind of went through again, uh, statuses, client projects list and a folder, um, multiple custom fields. adding a task template.
14:03 And then how does the board view, uh, how, how would we visualize projects on a board view and then a simple automation.
14:09 So hopefully that's helpful for you guys. Again, uh, really fun chatting with you. Leave a comment, ask more questions. You can always find us at hydrant.us.
14:17 Alright, thanks so much. Bye.
