Keep track of every client, estimate, project and payment with a fully integrated CRM for your construction business.
Stay organized with a built-in CRM, built specifically for construction and integrated with the entire platform.
"If I save two hours a week on projects, that's a hundred hours out of the year. If I'm charging $100 an hour for my time, that's $10,000 saved."
Business tools are just the beginning.
First impressions matter. Compete on professionalism rather than just price with automatically generated presentations that help contractors close 20% more jobs on average.
Make more profit with optional items, upgrades and selections so your customers can upgrade themselves without an awkward phone call -- or any extra work for you.
Setting up all your jobs is a part-time job in itself -- but in Bolster the budget and schedule generate automatically from the estimate. It's fully customizable of course -- but without any of the up-front repetitive work.
Save time, win more jobs, increase profit, and get paid faster with Bolster.
Get startedA construction CRM is the system that holds every lead, estimate, job and client conversation in one place, so nothing slips between the first phone call and the final payment. For a residential contractor, that means you can see at a glance who is waiting on a quote, who opened the proposal last night, which jobs are booked and which invoices are still open.
Generic CRMs were built for sales teams selling software or insurance. A CRM for contractors has to understand estimates, change orders, schedules and progress payments, because in construction the sale does not end when the contract is signed. It keeps going until the last payment clears.
Most contractors already have a CRM. It is usually a mix of a notebook, a phone full of texts, an email inbox and a spreadsheet someone updates on Sunday night. The problem is not a lack of information. It is that the information lives in five places and nobody can see the whole picture.
A good construction CRM software setup replaces that with one pipeline:
If your CRM stops at "deal won", you will end up re-typing the job into three other tools. That is where errors and lost margin come from.
Remodelers, custom home builders and specialty trades run long, high-touch sales cycles. A kitchen remodel can take weeks of site visits, revisions and selections before a client commits. A generic CRM can log the calls, but it cannot show you which version of the estimate the client is looking at, or that they just swapped quartz for laminate.
Contractors who try to bend a generic CRM to fit usually hit the same walls:
Use this list when comparing tools. If a product cannot tick most of these boxes, it will create more admin than it removes.
A CRM only works if the process behind it is clear. Here is a five-stage pipeline that suits most residential contractors:
Review the pipeline weekly. Leads that sit in "estimate sent" for more than two weeks need a call, a revised option or a decision to let them go.
Homeowners rarely call one contractor. They fill in two or three forms, or ring the first few names they find, and the contractor who gets back to them first usually earns the site visit. Many lost jobs are never really lost on price. They are lost because nobody called back until Thursday.
A construction CRM fixes this in two ways. First, new inquiries land in one place instead of across voicemail, email and social messages, so you can see what is waiting. Second, you can assign leads to a person, set a follow-up and see at a glance which ones have not been touched. For teams, round-robin distribution means leads are shared out automatically instead of sitting in an inbox.
The same logic applies after the estimate goes out. A client who opens your proposal three times in one evening is ready to talk. A client who has not opened it in a week needs a nudge, a simpler option or a call to understand what changed.
You do not need a dashboard full of charts. A handful of numbers tells you how healthy your sales pipeline is:
Review these monthly. If win rate drops, look at your proposals. If time in stage climbs, look at your follow-up habits.
Bolster's CRM pipeline is part of the same platform you use to estimate, schedule and get paid, so the client record follows the job from start to finish.
Contractors tell us the biggest change is not the software itself. It is that they stop chasing information. As Michael at MJK Builders put it, saving two hours a week on projects adds up to around a hundred hours a year.
If you are comparing options, see how Bolster stacks up against Buildertrend and JobTread, or book a demo to see the pipeline with your own jobs.
A construction CRM is customer relationship management software built for contractors. It tracks leads, estimates, booked jobs and payments in one pipeline, so you can see every client and every job from first contact to final invoice.
The best CRM for contractors is one that is built around estimates and jobs, not just contacts. Look for engagement alerts on quotes, a visual pipeline, lead capture, a hand-off from signed estimate to schedule and budget, online payments and a client portal.
Yes, often more than large firms. A one or two person business loses jobs when follow-ups depend on memory. A simple CRM pipeline makes sure every lead gets a response and every sent estimate gets a follow-up.
You can, but you will need separate tools for estimating, scheduling and payments, and you will re-enter data between them. A construction CRM keeps the estimate, the job and the client history together.
Yes. Bolster syncs customer information, line items, tax and payments with QuickBooks, and it also integrates with CompanyCam and Zapier.
It helps you respond faster, follow up at the right moment and send a better proposal. Bolster alerts you when a client opens your quote, and its auto-generated presentations help contractors close around 20% more jobs on average.
