Sales & CRM

How to run a weekly sales pipeline review as Construction and Contractor Founders

Sales & CRMFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're running 6 active jobs, have 4 bids out, and your 'pipeline review' is a Friday-evening scroll through your email inbox and a QuickBooks AR report you printed three days ago. Buildertrend or CoConstruct has job status somewhere, but it doesn't talk to QuickBooks, your bid spreadsheet lives on your laptop, and the change orders that turned a $180K bath remodel into a $220K job still aren't reflected in your margin estimates. You lose track of which GC prospects never got a follow-up call after you sent the bid, and you find out a sub's COI expired when it's too late. There's no single place that shows you: what's in the pipeline, what's the realistic close value, and whether collections will cover payroll next month.

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Sales & CRMFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live pipeline view that shows every active bid and job — stage, contract value, change order total, and last contact date — pulled from your field software and email without manual entry

A weekly digest that surfaces which bids have gone cold (no follow-up in 14+ days), which AR invoices are overdue, and whether your projected cash-in covers committed crew costs for the next 30 days

A follow-up task queue that tells you who to call Monday morning, ranked by bid size and days since last contact

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Sales Agent CRM

Data sources & config

The CRM and weekly pipeline review wire together three data sources: Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (AR aging, invoices, vendor bills) and your Plaid bank data on a schedule (running cash balance, recent transactions). Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider so email thread history surfaces inside each deal record automatically. Buildertrend and CoConstruct don't have a direct sync today, so Starch automates them through your browser — no API needed — to pull job status and completion dates into your pipeline on a schedule.

Prompts to copy

Build me a construction pipeline CRM with stages: Estimating, Bid Sent, Negotiating, Contract Signed, In Progress, Punch List, Closed Won, Closed Lost. Fields for each deal: job type (new construction, remodel, tenant improvement, specialty trade), contract value, change order total, adjusted contract value, estimated gross margin %, last contact date, decision maker name, and next follow-up action. Pull contact and deal history from Gmail. Flag any deal where last contact was more than 14 days ago and the stage is still Bid Sent or Negotiating.

Every Monday at 7am, pull my Plaid bank balance and QuickBooks AR aging, cross-reference against my open payroll liability from QuickBooks, and Slack me a message that says: current cash, AR due this month, payroll due this month, and whether I'm short. Also list any AR invoice over 30 days overdue with the client name and amount.

Scrape my Buildertrend project list — job name, status, and scheduled completion date — and update the matching deals in my CRM so the 'In Progress' stage reflects what's actually in the field system.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers in Starch — this gives your pipeline view live AR balances, outstanding invoices, and cash position without any manual export.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so every email thread with a client or GC automatically attaches to the right deal record — no more hunting through your inbox to remember where a bid conversation left off.

3 Start from the CRM app in the Starch App Store, then tell Starch your actual pipeline stages and fields. Construction deals have different data than SaaS deals — your prompt should name change orders, job type, margin estimate, and sub-contractor dependencies explicitly.

4 Set Starch to automate your Buildertrend or CoConstruct dashboard through your browser to pull current job status and scheduled completion dates into matching CRM records on a weekly schedule — no API contract with your field software required.

5 Add a custom field for 'change order total' that Starch can update from your QuickBooks change order invoices — this gives you adjusted contract value and a running margin estimate per job rather than just the original bid number.

6 Build the Monday morning cash-position automation: Starch pulls QuickBooks payroll liability and AR aging, compares against Plaid cash balance, and sends you a Slack message before your crew arrives so you're not surprised mid-week.

7 Set a 'bid follow-up' alert rule in the CRM: any deal in Bid Sent or Negotiating with no Gmail thread activity in 14 days surfaces in a daily digest with the decision maker's name, bid amount, and a suggested follow-up note based on prior conversation context.

8 Ask Starch a plain-English question each Friday: 'Which bids sent this month haven't had a response, and what's the total value at risk?' — you get a list ranked by dollar size, not a canned report you have to filter yourself.

9 Use the same CRM to track subcontractor relationships — add a 'COI expiration date' field and set an automation to flag any sub with a COI expiring within 30 days so you're not scrambling when a job starts.

10 At the end of each month, prompt Starch to generate a pipeline summary: bids won vs. lost, average bid-to-close time, total change order volume added to active jobs, and projected revenue for next 60 days based on contracts signed — this is the 15-minute owner's review you'd otherwise skip because building it manually takes two hours.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

April 2026 Weekly Pipeline Review — 6-job GC, $2.1M active backlog

Sample numbers from a real run

Contract Signed — Kitchen addition, Riverside Dr	142,000
Change orders added to date — Riverside Dr	31,500
Bid Sent — Office TI, Commerce Park (18 days, no reply)	87,000
Bid Sent — Deck + ADU, Maple Ave (6 days)	64,000
AR overdue 30+ days — Foundation repair, Oak St	22,400
Payroll liability due May 1	38,200
Plaid cash balance as of Monday 7am	54,100

Monday morning, Starch fires at 7am. Cash is $54,100. Payroll is $38,200 due in 11 days. AR aging shows $22,400 overdue 30+ days on the Oak Street foundation job — that's the check you need to collect this week, or you're scrambling on payroll Friday. The Riverside Drive kitchen remodel has ballooned from $142K to $173,500 with change orders; your CRM shows that adjusted number automatically because Starch pulled the CO invoices from QuickBooks overnight. The Commerce Park TI bid has been sitting 18 days with no reply — Starch flagged it in the pipeline digest with the GC's name and the original email thread summary so you can make the call before 9am with context. The Maple Ave deck bid is only 6 days old, no action needed yet. Total backlog value with change orders: $2.1M across 6 active jobs. You spend 12 minutes on this instead of an hour pulling reports, and you actually make the Commerce Park follow-up call before lunch.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Bid-to-contract conversion rate by job type (remodel vs. new construction vs. specialty trade)

Average days from bid sent to signed contract — flagging bids over 21 days with no activity

Change order volume as a percentage of original contract value per active job

AR overdue 30+ days vs. upcoming payroll liability — the cash-gap number you actually watch

Projected cash-in next 30 days based on signed contracts and AR schedule vs. committed crew and sub costs

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Buildertrend or CoConstruct alone

Great for project management and scheduling, but doesn't show you bid pipeline, cash position, or AR aging — you're still toggling between three separate systems every Monday morning.

HubSpot or Salesforce

Built for SaaS and B2B sales cycles, not construction — no native change order tracking, no QuickBooks AR tie-in, and you'll spend a week configuring it for job stages before you get any value.

QuickBooks + Excel pipeline tracker

Works until your bid volume hits 8-10 active estimates; after that, the spreadsheet is always a week stale and you have no visibility into follow-up timing or email thread history.

Procore

Full-featured for commercial GCs with 50+ people, but the pricing and implementation overhead aren't built for a sub-20-crew shop — you'd pay for features you won't use for two years.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, sales agent crm all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My field software is Buildertrend. Does Starch connect to it directly?

Buildertrend doesn't appear in Starch's scheduled-sync providers today. Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — so it can pull job names, statuses, and completion dates on a schedule and push them into your CRM. It works the same way you'd manually check Buildertrend, just without you doing it.

Can Starch track change orders, or does it only see the original contract value?

If your change orders run through QuickBooks invoices, Starch syncs that data on a schedule and can calculate an adjusted contract value per job. If change orders live only in Buildertrend or a separate PDF, Starch can pull them through browser automation — you'd describe the fields you want captured and Starch builds the extraction.

I'm not SOC 2 certified — is Starch?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your GC contract or a commercial client requires certified data handling for any system that touches their project financials, that's worth knowing upfront. For most residential and small commercial operators, this hasn't been a blocker.

Will this replace my controller or bookkeeper?

No — and it shouldn't try to. What Starch replaces is the two hours you spend every Monday manually pulling reports from three systems and trying to reconcile them in your head before your first site visit. Your bookkeeper still handles the entries; Starch just makes the summary visible without the manual assembly.

What if I have bids in Excel, not a CRM or field software?

You can connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live. Describe your spreadsheet columns to Starch and it builds a CRM that ingests that structure — you're not starting over, just giving it a better front end.

Can I track subcontractor COI expiration dates in the same place?

Yes. When you build your CRM, tell Starch to add a 'Subcontractor' record type with a COI expiration date field, and set an automation to flag any sub with an expiring certificate 30 days out. If your COIs live in a folder in Google Drive or Dropbox, Starch can connect to those from its integration catalog and the agent queries the files when the automation runs.