A CRM for Tradespeople That Keeps Enquiries and Quotes from Going Cold

A CRM like Customermates suits a trade business whose problem sits in the office: enquiries that arrive by WhatsApp while you're on a job, quotes nobody chases and service customers who are never called back. It does not schedule crews, write quotes, send invoices or run on a native phone app. If you want one app that does all of that, a field-service or trade-software product such as Jobber, Housecall Pro or, in Germany, HERO or Plancraft fits better, and the table below shows where the line runs.

Customermates is an open-source, AI-native CRM built in Germany. This page shows how electricians, plumbers, heating and HVAC firms, solar installers, builders, cleaning companies and garages set it up, what it costs, and what they keep elsewhere.

CRM or job management software?

Most products sold as a CRM for tradespeople are job management suites with a customer list inside. They are the right choice when the field side is your bottleneck. A CRM is the better choice when the jobs run fine and the leaks are earlier: the call-back you forgot, the quote that sat for three weeks.

Some firms run both: job software for the work itself and Customermates for the commercial side, such as builders bidding on tenders or HVAC firms selling replacements and maintenance contracts. That only makes sense if the overlap does not double your typing.

What a trade business needs from a CRM

• Enquiries come in everywhere. A WhatsApp with three photos, a missed call, an email from a property manager, a message on Instagram. If they don't land in one list, some never get an answer.
• Quotes go quiet. You visit the site, send the price and get busy. The customer who hears nothing for ten days often books someone else.
• Two kinds of work. A dripping tap is booked the same day. A heat pump, a rewire or a roof runs through a site visit, a quote and weeks of waiting. A pipeline has to show both without burying the large jobs.
• Repeat work has a date. Boiler services, electrical inspections, gas safety checks, HVAC maintenance, window cleaning rounds. The money is in calling customers before they call someone else.
• Some customers are companies. Landlords, property managers and general contractors send many jobs across many sites, and you need their history in one place.

A trade setup in Customermates

Customermates starts with five lists, and you can add your own. In Configure you can rename any list under General: Contacts to Clients and Deals to Jobs fit most trades. Every field name below is an example.

Stages and the value of open quotes

The stage is a single choice field you define, and each option can carry a win probability. A starting point: New enquiry 10%, Site visit 25%, Quote sent 40%, Accepted 90%, Booked 100%, Done 100%, Lost 0%. Same-day repair calls skip from New enquiry to Booked; large jobs walk through every stage. Filter the board by Job type when you want to see only one kind.

A job's value is the sum of its line items, each a service times quantity. A heat pump installation quoted at €14,000 sits in Quote sent at a weighted €5,600. That is arithmetic from your own probabilities, not a forecast. On the pipeline board each job is a card you drag between stages, and you can assign several people to it.

Four saved views for the morning

1. New enquiries: jobs in New enquiry, newest first.
2. Quotes to chase: jobs in Quote sent, sorted by Quote sent on, oldest first.
3. Booked this week: jobs in Booked, sorted by Planned for. This is a list, not a schedule; it does not check who is free.
4. Services due: clients with a Next service date, sorted by it, soonest first. Date filters on your own fields take fixed dates (before, after, between), so a sort keeps this view current without editing it.

Saved views are personal, so each colleague sets the same filters and saves their own view.

WhatsApp and email in one inbox (Pro and above)

On Pro, Business and Enterprise in Customermates Cloud, the unified inbox brings in email from Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and LinkedIn. You reply on the original channel. The filter Participants: not fully linked shows the people who are not yet linked to a contact, which in a trade business usually means new enquiries. Link the sender once and every conversation with that number or address appears on the client's timeline. Photos a customer sends stay in the conversation; records have no file attachments.

Plan for two details. Pro includes 1 connected account per user, so a sole trader who wants WhatsApp and a mailbox in the inbox needs Business, which includes 3. A team on Pro can split it: the office connects WhatsApp, the owner connects email. And conversations stay private to whoever connected the account until they share a thread; sharing a whole account needs Business. Phone calls and SMS are not channels.

An evening enquiry round with Mate (Customermates Cloud)

Mate is the assistant inside Customermates Cloud and runs on hosted AI credits that each cloud plan includes per active user; reading inbox conversations needs Pro or higher. A routine runs a saved instruction on a schedule. Choose Every day at 18:00 and write something like:

Look at inbox conversations where the last message was received today
and the sender is not linked to a contact. For each one that is a job
enquiry, create a job in the stage New enquiry with the job type and site
address if the customer gave them. Save a short draft reply that thanks
them and asks for photos and two times that suit them for a site visit.
Do not send anything. End with a list: name, channel, job type, draft
saved yes or no.

A second routine on Monday morning can find jobs in Quote sent with no update for ten days and save a polite follow-up draft for each.

Starter includes 1 routine per user and Pro includes 5; the inbox round above needs Pro, because Starter has no inbox. Prefer your own AI client? Connect Claude, ChatGPT or another client through MCP, on any plan or a self-hosted server, with model use billed by your AI provider.

Adjustments by trade

What Customermates does not do for trades

• No scheduling board, dispatch, routes or technician availability. A job with a Planned for date is a reminder for you, not a booking.
• No quotes, invoices or payments. Write the quote in your trade or accounting software and record its value on the job.
• No time tracking, site diary, materials or stock.
• No native iOS or Android app and no offline mode. The browser version adapts to phone screens.
• Tasks have no due dates, reminders or notifications. Add a date field and a saved view, or let a routine do the checking.
• No phone system or SMS, and no bulk messages to all customers.

If one of these is the main reason you are shopping, look at software built for it. Customermates publishes this page; vendor details were checked on 8 October 2026 on each vendor's own website.

What it costs

Prices are per active user per month, billed monthly. Every plan includes REST, webhooks and MCP.

Each cloud plan adds monthly hosted AI credits per active user for Mate; the amounts are on the pricing page. Seats are per user, so engineers who never log in need no account. You can run the open-source core on your own server with no licence fee, but a self-hosted installation has no inbox, no Mate and no routines.

Moving in from a spreadsheet or phone contacts

Save your customer list as an Excel workbook (.xlsx); CSV files are not accepted. Import landlords and contractors as organizations first, then contacts with a column naming their company, so the import links them. Open jobs come last, with stage, job type and quote dates. Records import and export one record type at a time; the records guide has the limits. In Customermates Cloud the primary database is configured in the AWS Frankfurt region, the subprocessors are listed, and a data processing agreement is available.

Frequently asked questions