Two calls, two customers, and neither one of them is holding the check
A restoration owner’s evenings go to the paperwork of the day’s losses: moisture readings to log for every job still drying, photographs to sort for the adjusters, equipment to track from one basement to the next, scopes to write, and the carriers’ calls that came in while you were on the wand. In the middle of it all is the woman who rang at four with her kitchen ceiling coming down. She wanted to know whether this was two thousand dollars of extraction or twelve, she did not leave a voicemail, and she kept dialling until somebody picked up.
The second call has a date on it. A settlement is three weeks out and the buyer’s agent wants an air test, or a carrier has questioned a claim and somebody needs a report that survives being read with a loss estimate in the other hand. A flooded kitchen and a settlement deadline are different customers, so they get different forms. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the dry-out asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the mold inspection carries the trip and the sampling pump inside its number instead of springing them at the door, and putting the house back afterwards goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The dry-out flow also asks if she has a photo of the wet floor or the stain on the ceiling, and the lead shows her answer, so you ask for those pictures when you call back — they are the ones your adjuster will want later. The lead carrying the image itself is on the roadmap, so it is not ticked.
Every hour you are on a loss is an hour you cannot answer the phone.
In restoration a missed call is not bad manners; it is where your hands are. You are on the wand, or you are in a category-three basement in a respirator and a suit with your phone sealed in a truck two floors up, or you are on your knees with a meter reading a wall and both hands full. The other two are carrying equipment. And the calls that come while you are in there are not idle ones: every person ringing has water moving through their house right now, and if you do not answer, they are ringing other firms in the same ten minutes.
| What a missed restoration call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A Tuesday-morning supply line: 800 wet square feet, carpet out, four days of equipment | $3,475 – $4,423 |
| The same water, found on the third day, standing | $4,200 – $4,704 |
| Two air samples and one room, before a settlement date | $474 – $556 |
| One recovered dry-out pays for | 17 months of the bundle |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ texts back the caller you missed, the first text she gets from you carries your firm’s name, and her answer lands on the thread that holds her dry-out questions. The message is picked by the hour and the day — the demo shop’s office runs 7am to 6pm, so a call that arrives after it closes gets the after-hours version that says somebody is on call rather than one that says the crew is out on a loss — and every version asks the two questions that sort your morning: what is wet, and is the water still running. By six the next morning you already have four things:
The overnight losses, in the order they rang
Every missed call you log sits in one list with the caller, the number, the time and the reply written back. After a storm night you work the losses in order, rather than from a phone that shows nine names and no times.
The reason behind every reply that waited
A reply a rule stopped is recorded as blocked, and the reason is spelled out: quiet hours where the caller is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. The two-in-the-morning ceiling leak shows why it got no text, so it is the first one you ring.
One conversation per wet house
Her phone number links the eight dry-out questions she filled in at half past nine last night with the call she made at ten past six this morning, and you read them as one conversation on one screen.
Losses counted, tests left out
Each send keeps a tag for where it came from, and the dashboard count drops the ones you sent yourself while setting up, so what you see is homeowners with water in the house.
Where texting stands right now, in plain words. There is no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today: you log the missed call, and the reply is written, checked against every rule and parked in your outbox where you can read it. The rest is built and running: the five messages, the hours for each day, the weekend, holiday and vacation rules, the quiet hours, the opt-outs, and the thread where her reply will sit beside her quote. Two rules are fixed for good. A text reaches a caller only between 8am and 9pm where she is, as her area code says, so a ceiling that comes down at two in the morning is recorded as blocked with the reason, not held for the morning, and nothing sends it at eight. And when sending switches on, a reply that has waited over an hour is retired, never delivered, because “sorry we missed your call” landing after another firm has the blowers running does nobody any good. The code that takes a forwarded call and texts the caller back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks; it has no phone number to answer on yet, which is a matter of paperwork, not software.
On the example restoration firm, set the clock to a late evening and the same rules record the call as blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open the example account’s own dashboard, no signup, pick CallMitt in the left menu, and read the firm’s five messages and its office hours.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersEight questions set a dry-out number, and one of them sets nothing
What the water is, and where it came from
Clean supply water from a hose, a heater or an appliance; rain, storm or ground water through a wall; or a sewage backup. A pick-one, and a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because the category changes the respirators, the containment, the antimicrobial and how much porous material leaves the building all at once — 0, 12 and 35 percent on the demo. The percentage rides on the option she picks, and nothing about it is counted per room or per foot.
Wet finished floor, in square feet
The one genuinely per-unit line on the dry-out — your square-foot rate multiplied by however much floor is actually wet, $1.35 on the demo, capped at 50 to 3,000 with a step of fifty so nobody is typing 847. Paced out room by room, counting anywhere the baseboard has gone dark rather than only where there is standing water. It is the figure a homeowner is least able to guess and the first one your meter corrects.
What is on that floor
Bare concrete or tile, carpet and pad coming out, engineered wood or laminate, or solid hardwood you are trying to save with mats and panels. A pick-one carrying its own flat amount — $0, $420, $780 and $1,250 on the demo — priced once for the job however many rooms it runs through. Saving a hardwood floor costs more on the day and a great deal less than a new floor, which is a conversation better had on the form than in the driveway.
How far up the wall it went
Nothing up the wall, a flood cut two feet up, four feet up with the insulation soaked, or down through the ceiling. Another pick-one with its own flat amount — $640 for the two-foot cut on the demo — because wet insulation will not dry behind closed drywall, and the moment the wall opens you have stopped drying a room and started rebuilding part of one. It is the single most common reason an estimate gets revised standing in the basement.
Stored contents and furniture
A yes/no worth 15 percent on the demo, and a percentage rather than a fee because emptying, blocking and putting back twenty years of boxes is hours of labor spread across the whole job instead of one line of it. Percentages pool and land once on the whole subtotal, so a yes here and a sewage category do not compound one on top of the other — they are added together first and applied together.
Whether it stood more than 48 hours
A yes raises the job minimum and adds no fee. Two days is the line in the standard: past it, clean water is no longer treated as clean whatever it started as. On the demo a yes means the quote never comes back under $4,200. The arithmetic is untouched: the finished number simply gets a floor, and the bottom of the published range sits on it instead of 12 percent below the midpoint.
How long the equipment stays
Blowers and dehumidifiers multiplied by the days they stay — four blowers for three days is twelve equipment-days — asked as one compound number on purpose. The engine adds; it never multiplies one of her answers by another one. Two questions, "how many blowers" and "how many days", would add together rather than multiply, and the arithmetic further down this page would be visibly wrong. So the multiplication is done out loud in the help text, at $42 an equipment-day on the demo. This is the answer that moves the number more than any other.
Whether it is going through insurance
Asked, required, and deliberately carrying no rule at all: yes or no, the number does not move by a cent. It tells you to photograph and meter the damage the way an adjuster wants it, keep the daily readings in a form they will accept, and offer to meet hers on site. It is on the form precisely because the engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit, so the one thing it must never do is behave as though a claim changes the price. Travel zones sit on the account rather than the service, and price the trip from the ZIP she types.
A real dry-out, start to finish
Eight questions and a photo, which she can answer standing on the stairs with the valve off. They run in this order on our restoration demo account, and the total at the bottom is what the live engine returns for these answers; nobody typed it into the page.
| # | What she is asked | What she picks | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is the water, and where did it come from? | A supply line, a water heater or an appliance hose | Clean supply water — the category percent is 0% on the demo |
| 2 | How much finished floor is wet? | 800 square feet | 800 × the square-foot rate — $1.35 on the demo, so $1,080 |
| 3 | What is on the wet floor? | Carpet and pad, coming out | A flat $420, once for the job |
| 4 | How far up the wall did the water go? | A flood cut two feet up, drywall and insulation out | A flat $640, once for the job |
| 5 | Is the wet area full of stored contents or furniture? | No | Nothing — the 15% only fires on yes |
| 6 | Had the water been standing more than 48 hours? | No | Nothing — the floor stays at the service minimum |
| 7 | How many equipment-days do you think it will take? | Thirty-two — six blowers and two dehumidifiers for four days | 32 × the equipment-day rate — $42 on the demo, so $1,344 |
| 8 | Are you putting this through insurance? | Yes | Nothing. It changes the photographs, not the price |
| 9 | Got a photo of the water, or of where it is coming in? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $465 call-out + $1,080 + $420 + $640 + $1,344 = $3,949, and no percentage answer fires on this one, so the midpoint stays $3,949 | ||
| She sees | $3,475 – $4,423 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all eight answers, and the photo flag | ||
The square-foot rate, the tear-out amounts, the equipment-day rate and the category percentages above are the demo account’s, not a Tailgate Office™ price list; you set each in the dashboard, and a new equipment-day rate never touches your website. The total is what the engine really returns: $3,475 to $4,423 for those answers, which the demo gives you in about a minute. And one thing that band is not, on this trade above every other: it is not what she pays and it is not what you collect. It is what you bill. Her carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and her deductible comes off whatever they allow — the engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit, and the disclaimer under the number says so in your own words.
Want to see it work first? Our example restoration company’s website carries NapkinPrice, the same engine quoting live on a site that is not ours. Give it those answers and the same band comes back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)Three services, and only two of them ever show a price
A first-day dry-out, a mold report with a settlement date on it and putting the house back afterwards are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a rebuild like a wet carpet.
Extraction and the first day of dry-out — quotes instantly
The call-out, the crew and the moisture survey live inside the number rather than turning up at the door — $465 on the demo — and there is a job floor underneath at $2,000, because a truck rolling and a room drying has never cost less than that. One answer moves that floor instead of the price: say the water had been standing more than 48 hours and the minimum goes to $4,200, which is a floor and not a fee. The sum does not change; the bottom of the range goes flat — the smallest loss on the demo quotes $2,000 to $2,240, and a 48-hour yes comes back $4,200 to $4,704, flat along the bottom instead of 12 percent under the midpoint. Past a $12,000 midpoint it stops pricing and hands the lead to you instead of publishing a figure that size from eight answers, and on this service it is the day count, not the square footage, that gets a loss there. Read every band on this page as what you bill: the carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and the homeowner pays a deductible against whatever they allow, which is a number no form can know.
Mold inspection and air test — quotes instantly
This is where restoration parts company with plumbing or electrical, and the divergence is honest: there is no cheap diagnostic call here, because the truck rolls and extraction starts. The nearest true equivalent is the inspection — a scheduled visit, a sampling pump and a written report — and it is the call that pays for itself before a settlement date. The trip and the pump sit in the service base fee, $225 on the demo, added once however many samples you end up drawing. The band is tighter than the dry-out at plus or minus 8 percent rather than 12, because a fixed time and a fixed report is a far better known job than a loss nobody has seen yet. Two samples and one room for a house sale quotes $474 to $556. There is a floor at $395 and a ceiling at $2,200, because past that it is a building survey and a survey gets a visit first.
Reconstruction after the dry-out — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer for putting a house back together: drywall, trim, paint, flooring, cabinets, sometimes a kitchen. The service still asks what came out during the dry-out, how many rooms have to go back, who is paying for it and whether anybody is living in there while the work goes on — none of which moves any money, all of which tells you what you are walking into and which format to write the scope in. She is told plainly that this one is seen before it is priced; you get a lead with the scope in outline, and the rebuild is often the bigger job of the two.
Each priced service needs a real base fee or a real minimum before it can go live, deliberately: without one it could show a homeowner $0, and a single bad number on your website costs more than a day of setup done properly.
The first thing to screen for here is not a ticket. It is whether he will do it
The first question here is not about a licence; it is the one the work itself turns on. This is sewage water, respirators, and tearing wet drywall off a wall for a day. Plenty of good tradesmen will not do that, and finding out in week two costs you a truck, a fortnight and a loss you had to hand to somebody else.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the truck and the equipment trailer. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for sewage water and respirators and pulling out wet drywall, has he set air movers and dehumidifiers off moisture readings and logged a structure dry, how many years has he done restoration work, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three answers end the screening (under 18, not willing to do the work, or living past your distance), and the other four come back as a weighted fit score. The drying skill sits in the third question as a scored answer rather than a knockout, so an applicant who has done the work but holds no certificate is still in the running.
Take two settings from the demo job. Distance is a knockout with no weight, because a number answer scores higher as it rises, and a weighted distance would put the technician who lives furthest from the shop at the top. The last-job question is unweighted too, since any answer gets full marks and weighting it would reward anyone who typed a word. All seven questions on the demo job have a Spanish translation.
Until your texting number is live, an applicant takes the seven questions on your screening page, not by text, with the same knockouts, scoring and pool. The keyword on the truck starts answering once your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
A dry-out gets its review once the claim is closed, not the day the blowers come out
The meters read dry, the structure is logged and the blowers are back on the truck. That is not the day to ask her for anything. She still has an adjuster on the phone, a wall open at the flood cut, a line-item schedule she has never seen before and a deductible coming off whatever they allow, and a review request that lands in the middle of that reads like one more bill. Once the carrier is done with her and the house is hers again, she remembers exactly who showed up with a wand at ten o’clock at night; that is the day to ask. The firm with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, once the claim is closed.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered dry-out covers 17 months
That is one dry-out at the demo’s rates; every air test before a settlement date comes on top.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back and text-to-apply hiring (texts go out once texting is switched on), and, once switched on, a review request after every job, plus customers, jobs, estimates and invoices in one place. 30 days free, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.
Start Free TrialOnly need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.
Water damage questions we get asked
Side by side. Your business number stays where it is and rings as it does now; nothing is ported, and a call your on-call tech picks up never forwards at all. The design is a forwarding code, dialled once from the setup guide, that moves a call nobody answers in about twenty seconds on to your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your firm, where a short greeting in place of voicemail says a text is coming. An unanswered call can forward to one place at a time, so the texting number and an answering service take turns by the hour, and a second code switches the forwarding off. Until your texting number is live you log missed calls by hand, and CallMitt picks the message for the hour and day, checks your hours, the quiet hours, your opt-outs and your suppression list, and keeps the reply in your outbox to read. The code that will take a forwarded call on its own is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks, and waits only on a phone number.
It is kept as blocked, with the reason, and goes no further. Texts go to callers only from 8am to 9pm in their own time zone, read off the area code, and nothing on our side overrides that, so a two o’clock reply never joins a queue. Nor is it tried again at eight: a blocked reply stays blocked, on purpose. And any reply that did queue but waited more than an hour is retired, not delivered, because a "sorry we missed your call" the next afternoon is worse than silence. So say it plainly, because this is the trade it matters most on: if you advertise round-the-clock, a text-back is not your night shift — a human is. What this gives you at six in the morning is the list — who rang, at what time, and why nothing went out — so the two o’clock caller hears from you before she has finished ringing round.
It stops and passes the lead to you. Every instant service carries a ceiling, and on the demo the dry-out is set at a $12,000 midpoint — a category-three loss across two floors with three months of equipment on it goes straight past that, and she gets a plain "this one is bigger than we can price online" note and your disclaimer instead of a number. The engine checks the ceiling against the midpoint before drawing any range, so it decides on the size of the loss, not on the top of a band. Set yours where you would stop quoting a loss over the phone, and remember that on this trade the thing that carries a job over the line is usually the day count rather than the floor area.
Because the engine adds and it does not multiply one of her answers by another one, and we would rather tell you that than hide it. A dry-out is billed as units times days, but there is no rule kind that reaches across to a second question — two questions, "how many blowers" and "how many days", would be added together and the arithmetic on this page would be visibly wrong. So it is asked as one compound number with the multiplication done out loud in the help text: four blowers for three days is twelve. It is a guess until the meters say otherwise, which the help text also says. If you would rather not ask a homeowner to do that sum at all, the other honest shape is one service per drying class with the days built into each.
It does not, and no form on the internet can tell you. What the widget prints is what the contractor bills. If the loss is going through insurance, the carrier adjudicates its own line-item schedule afterwards and your deductible comes off whatever they allow — so the number you actually pay is set by your policy, not by this. The engine has no concept of a deductible, an adjuster or a policy limit and does not pretend to: the insurance question on the form carries no pricing rule at all, and answering it yes or no does not move the total by a cent. What it does do is tell the contractor to photograph and meter the damage the way an adjuster wants it and to offer to meet yours on site.
A range, and no tighter than that. The widget shows a bracket and the disclaimer under it says the day count is what the meters say rather than what anybody guessed, because every wet material gets read before a single blower goes down and re-read every morning. Write that in your own words: the call-out and the survey in, the rebuild out, containment and negative air priced when the category says so. A homeowner who gets an honest bracket at half past nine at night stops calling down the list — and the one whose water is a mop and a fan finds that out on your website instead of on your morning, which is a kindness to both of you.
Yes, and it is the right place for it, because the disclaimer under the number is yours to write. The demo dry-out’s says the figure is what the firm bills, that the carrier adjudicates its own schedule afterwards and the deductible comes off what they allow; the demo rebuild’s says the scope is written in the format the carrier’s estimating software reads. Say what you actually do, in your own words: whether you meet the adjuster on site, how you send the daily readings, and when you need her claim number.
Yes. Every service is set up on its own, so the inspection and air test can quote instantly while the dry-out runs in site-visit mode, showing no number but still collecting every answer she gives. She picks the service before she sees a single question, so each form only asks what it needs.
Roughly fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and the hours you keep each day, a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page, and about an hour for the eight dry-out questions with your square-foot rate, tear-out amounts, equipment-day rate and travel zones. A priced service will not go live without a real base fee or a real minimum, which is deliberate. No onboarding call, no setup fee, no contract: $199 a month for all four tools.
Also do mold remediation, or sub the rebuild out? The other trades have pages too, the compliance page covers texting the people who call you, and you can ask us anything we missed.
Catch the call you could not take. Put a real number on the dry-out.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.