Trade page · Plumbers, heating engineers, sanitary installation

AI for plumbers and heating engineers: get back 5 to 8 hours a week on your quotes, your calls and your invoices.

A tradesperson running their own business spends 10 hours a week on admin. None of it lays a pipe. I connect automations to your current tools to give you back half of it, and leave you the job.

Book my free scoping call €3,900 excl. VAT · your quotes go out the same day, not in the evening any more
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The numbers behind the trade

How many hours does a plumber really lose to admin?

Ten hours a week, on average, for a tradesperson running their own business. That's 22% of a working week of 46 hours, and it's the only time in the week that brings in nothing.

This figure comes from a survey run by the Asterès consultancy for FAFCEA among more than 1,200 tradespeople running their own businesses. It matches what the CAPEB's ARTISANTE barometer found, carried out with the CNATP and IRIS-ST among 3,029 construction and landscaping business owners: admin is the third biggest source of stress in the trade, cited by 41% of business owners, and almost one in five works more than 60 hours a week. These ten hours of paperwork don't come out of time on site. They get added on, in the evenings and at weekends.

10h/week

Out of 46 hours worked, 10 go on admin, that's 22% of the time. In the detail of the Asterès survey, it's customer relations (20% of that time), purchasing and stock (16%) and marketing materials (15%) that weigh heaviest. For a plumber, that has a name: the quotes typed up at 9pm, the calls returned between two jobs, the invoices re-entered on a Saturday.

An honest caveat, because it's in the same study: tradespeople who use AI today gain around 2 hours a week from it. Two hours is what ChatGPT gives you, open in the corner, used by hand, when you remember to. My work starts after that: a system connected to your quoting software and your calendar, running without you having to think about it, plays on a completely different scale. And in construction, only 16% of business owners have taken it up, the lowest rate of any trade. In other words, the field is wide open.

Sources: Asterès for FAFCEA, “L'intelligence artificielle et les chefs d'entreprise artisanale”, December 2024 (more than 1,200 respondents) · CAPEB, CNATP and IRIS-ST, ARTISANTE barometer, 11th edition, June 2025 (3,029 business owners with 0 to 19 employees).

What I install

What can actually be automated in a plumbing business?

Three things, in this order: quotes and their follow-ups, the calls you miss under a sink, invoices. The diagnosis, the advice to the customer, the hands-on work: that stays you, and it has to stay you.

1. The quote goes out that same evening, and it chases itself

You dictate the key points as you leave the visit, the quote is formatted with your prices and your wording, you check it over and send it. If it goes unanswered, a follow-up goes out after a few days, written in your words. No more quotes typed up at 9pm, no more lost jobs because someone else got back to them first.

2. The phone doesn't ring into thin air any more

A voice agent picks up when your hands are in a water heater. It understands a leak, notes the address, tells an emergency apart from a bathroom quote, offers a slot in your diary and sends you the recap by text. Sunday evening too, that's when the week's emergency call comes in.

3. The invoice follows the job, with no re-entry

An accepted quote becomes an invoice without anyone retyping a line. Unpaid invoices are chased on a schedule, not depending on your mood on a Saturday. And your bookkeeper gets the paperwork as it happens, rather than a shoebox in January.

The rule I give everyone. A task can be automated when you could explain its rule to a new employee in one sentence: “if the quote hasn't had a reply after five days, send this message”. Reassuring a worried customer before you break into her wall, sensing that a job is going to be tricky, deciding on a goodwill gesture: no machine does that, and nobody's asking you to let it go.

How much it costs

How much does automation cost for a plumbing and heating business?

From €3,900 to €5,800 excl. VAT to set up, depending on whether you add the phone or not, plus €190/month if you do. Prices published, scope written down, and I almost always advise starting with the sprint alone.

Automation Sprint

€3,900 excl. VAT

Your quotes out the same day, your follow-ups running without you

Quotes, follow-ups, invoices: 3 to 5 automations installed in your current tools, delivered in 2 to 3 weeks. Scope written at the Scan, then a fixed price, 30-day guarantee.

AI Phone Reception

€1,900 excl. VAT setup + €190/month

Calls picked up while you're on a job, with the recap by text

The voice agent that answers while you're on site, scripts written for plumbing, connected to your diary. The technology is included in the subscription, no commitment.

  • Before we start: the Scan at €890 excl. VAT, time to count your hours and set priorities, delivered within 5 working days. It hands you the firm price of the project that follows, valid for 60 days: you know what you are committing to before you decide.
  • After that, if you want it: the Pilot plan from €790 excl. VAT/month, which supervises and keeps improving things on an ongoing basis, no commitment. Many tradespeople go without it in the first year and manage with the documentation: you own everything.
  • The return on investment sums up in one line: the price is written down before we even talk, and a single job saved in the month already covers a good part of the sprint. It's the only calculation that matters, and you can do it tonight without me.

A real case

What does this look like for a real plumber?

Two hours of paperwork every evening became fifteen minutes of checking, once a week. That's the case of a plumber who wrote to me one evening in March because he couldn't keep up any more: what he was looking for wasn't “AI”, it was his evenings.

It took two weeks to get everything set up, with three simple building blocks: generating quotes from his template, tracking the ones that hadn't had a reply, and chasing unpaid invoices in his own tone. What got in the way is interesting: he wouldn't let a quote go out without reading it over first. He was right, and we built around that. One-click approval before every send. After two weeks, he was approving them almost without reading, because he'd seen it held up.

Read the full case notes: two hours of paperwork every evening, what automation changed for this plumber →

I used to spend my evenings on quotes and follow-ups. Alexandre set up automations that give me back several hours every week. In practice: I finish earlier, and no quote goes out late any more.

Wassim · Plumber

Several hours given back every week

Frequently asked questions

What tradespeople ask me before signing

I'm not a tech person, is this too complicated for me?

You don't have to learn anything new. You keep using your phone, your inbox and your quoting software: I'm the one connecting the automations behind the scenes, and you approve things with one click from your van. Training lasts two hours, and it's mainly there to show you how to take back control whenever you want.

Will this work with my current quoting software?

In the vast majority of cases, yes. Construction quoting software, your own spreadsheet, Word templates, a consumer mailbox: I connect to what you already have, you don't change tools. If your software is genuinely closed off, I'll tell you at the Scan, with the alternative and its cost, before you've signed anything at all.

My customers will get a robot on the phone, won't that put them off?

What puts them off today is voicemail. A voice agent announces that it's an assistant, understands a water leak, notes the address, gives a time slot and sends you the recap by text: to the caller, it's a switchboard that actually picks up. Listen to the demo before you judge it, that's the first thing every tradesperson client of mine does.

There are three of us in the business, is this worth it at that size?

That's actually the size where it shows the most, because there's no one in the office to absorb the paperwork. The maths comes down to two lines: the admin hours you get back, and the jobs you stop losing for want of a timely reply. If the numbers don't add up, I'll tell you at the scoping call and we'll leave it there.

Out of your ten hours of admin, how many can we give you back?

30 minutes on the phone, free of charge, no jargon: you leave with your figures in hours and euros, even if you don't end up working with me. Or count your hours yourself in 30 seconds.

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