Enquiries and site visits
Taking an enquiry in thirty seconds, booking the look at the job, and the one question about lost work that tells you whether you are too expensive or too slow.
Updated 16 September 2026
Most of what a builder loses, they lose before the job exists. An enquiry nobody rang back. A visit that never turned into a quote. A year of work from a source they could not name if you asked them. None of it appears in the accounts, because jobs that never happened leave no trace — which is exactly why it goes on happening.
Enquiries is the part of BuildFlow that sits before a project. It is on Basic and above.
Taking one down
Enquiries → New enquiry. The only thing it insists on is a name, because somebody is on the phone and a form that wants an email address before it will save is a form that loses the enquiry to the back of a delivery ticket. Everything else can be filled in when you have hung up.
Two dates, and they are not the same
"When did they get in touch" is the day they rang, not the day you typed it in. Enter Tuesday's call on Thursday evening and, if that field said today, every reply-time figure in the app would flatter you by two days. BuildFlow will not accept a date in the future, because a typo there quietly poisons every median it feeds.
Where did they hear about you
The field nobody would bother with, and the only one that answers a question you cannot answer any other way. Ask it while they are still talking — it is the only moment you will get a truthful answer, and "I think someone recommended us" six months later is worth nothing.
Referral and repeat client are deliberately separate. A customer coming back and a customer sending their sister are different businesses, they win at different rates, and a builder who cannot tell them apart cannot tell which one to spend money on.
The free text box beside it is for the part the list cannot hold: *Sarah at number 12*. The list is for counting; that is for remembering.
The list, and who to ring first
It is a list rather than a board. A kanban looks right in a screenshot and is useless on a phone in a van, which is where this actually gets looked at.
It sorts by what needs doing, not by stage, because the question is never "what is in the visited column" — it is "who have I not rung back". An unanswered enquiry goes to the top whatever it is worth. The sixty-thousand-pound job nobody replied to is worth nothing, and the builder who lost it will never know it was there.
| BuildFlow says | It means |
|---|---|
| No one has replied and it came in 6 days ago | The expensive one. Fix it today. |
| Came in today. Nobody has replied yet | Not a problem yet. It becomes one on Thursday. |
| Quoted 21 days ago with no answer. Worth a ring | The second most expensive failure, and the easiest to fix — most of these are won by one call nobody makes because the lead looks finished. |
| Visited but not quoted yet | You have already spent the diesel. The quote is the cheap part. |
The site visit
Book one from the enquiry. Booking it moves the enquiry along by itself — there is no second thing to remember to update, because the second thing never gets done and the pipeline stops being true within a fortnight.
Getting in
Asked when you book, shown first when you open the visit. Parking, gates, the dog, *ring rather than knock, baby asleep*. The moment you open this screen is the moment you are sitting outside in the van wondering which gate, and three days earlier on the phone was the only time anybody could have told you.
Photos
One button. On a phone it opens the camera rather than the gallery, and it does not ask you to categorise anything. You are standing in a garden holding a tape measure — a dialog wanting a room and a trade per shot means the photographs get taken in the phone's own camera app and never arrive here at all.
Visit photos are not project photos
They live apart and your client never sees them, even after the enquiry becomes a job. These are pictures of somebody's cluttered side return taken before there is any relationship at all, and they exist so you can price the work at the kitchen table on Thursday. A homeowner looking at a photograph of their own mess, captioned for an estimator, is not a conversation anybody wants.
What you found
Two boxes and no imposed structure, because "single skin rear wall, needs underpinning at the boundary — neighbour's extension is deeper" does not file under a heading, and a form that asks it to gets nothing at all. Measurements sit on their own only because that is the part you read back three days later with a pencil in your hand.
Save and mark visited does both at once and moves the enquiry on.
Winning it
Mark it Won, then Start the job. The address, the postcode and what they asked for all come across — nobody retypes a postcode they have already typed once, on a phone, in a van. You choose the job name and the kind of work, and pick a template if you use one; from there it is an ordinary project and everything else in BuildFlow applies.
The enquiry is not archived or deleted. It stays, linked to the job, as the record of where that work came from. That link is the entire reason recording the source was worth anything: a won enquiry with no job tells you nothing, and a job with no enquiry cannot be attributed to anything.
Starting the job is an owner or admin job
Creating a project already is, everywhere else in BuildFlow, and converting routes through exactly the same machinery — so your plan's project limit, your template's stages and the document folders all happen the way they always do. An employee can run the whole pipeline up to that point.
Losing it — the one question
Marking an enquiry lost asks why, and it is the only move in the whole pipeline that asks anything. BuildFlow will not record a loss without a reason; the database itself refuses it.
That looks like nagging and it is the most valuable field in this section. Most systems make it optional, the field is then empty on exactly the rows that matter, and a year later the builder cannot answer the only question worth asking about a bad year.
Too expensive and they stopped replying are opposite problems with opposite fixes. Builders assume the first, drop their margin, and lose the same amount of work — because the real answer was that they were third to call back. You cannot tell those apart from memory. Ten recorded losses and you can.
Reopening a lost enquiry clears the reason and the decision date, because a job lost in March and revived in June did not take three months to decide.
Where work comes from
The report on the Enquiries screen. It is the only page in BuildFlow whose whole value is rows about things that never happened.
How long you take
Three figures: to reply, to get out and look, to get a quote out. All medians rather than averages — one enquiry answered eight months late because somebody found it in a drawer would drag an average somewhere useless, and a number the builder stops trusting is a number that does nothing.
If your reply time is over two days BuildFlow says so plainly. Most homeowners ring three builders. Being third to call back usually decides it before anybody discusses price.
By source
Enquiries, wins, conversion rate and value for each source. Two findings matter and they are opposite shapes, so BuildFlow points them out in words rather than leaving you to compare percentage columns at eleven at night:
- A source with plenty of enquiries and a poor rate is costing you time — a lot of quoting for not much work.
- A source with three enquiries and three wins deserves more attention than its volume suggests.
It waits until at least three have been decided before saying anything. Two enquiries is not a pattern.
Why you lost them
Every recorded reason, ranked. If you lose at least as many to silence as to price, BuildFlow says so — that is not a pricing problem, it is a following-up one, and it is much cheaper to fix.
Who can see it
Owners, admins and employees. Not subcontractors, even though they are on your company's books, and obviously not clients.
The pipeline carries what work is coming, what it is worth and why jobs were lost. That is your commercial position, and a subcontractor on day rate is not a party to it. The rule is in the database rather than the interface, so it holds for the API and anything else that reaches the data.
What it does not do
- It does not price anything. The rough value on an enquiry is a ballpark for sorting the loft conversion from the fascia board. Quoting is a separate thing.
- It does not chase anybody for you. No automatic emails to homeowners. BuildFlow tells you who is waiting; the phone call is yours.
- It does not guess the source. There is no tracking, no attribution, no pixel. Somebody asks the question and types the answer, which is why the answer is worth having.
FlowAI knows the pipeline
Ask it what is outstanding, who has not been rung back, or how you are doing on replies, and it answers from the live record. It will not write to a homeowner on your behalf or decide what to charge.