The Paperwork Is the Part That Goes Wrong
Condicta Lite takes a service job from the scoping conversation to a paid invoice with about ten minutes of human time. Here's every step: how the estimate is built, how acceptance and booking work, and how the job closes out.
In a small service business, the job is rarely what goes wrong. The paperwork is.
The same person walks the site, writes the estimate, does the work and sends the bill, usually at night and usually from memory. Scope gets lost between what the customer asked for and what was written down. Hours get lost between what was done and what was invoiced. The work was fine. The record of it wasn't.
Condicta Lite is our answer to that, and it is now built end to end. It runs today on real jobs at the service companies in our own group. This is how it works, step by step.
1. Scope it however the conversation happened
A tech can upload a call transcript, forward the email thread, or simply dictate the scope after walking the site. Whatever form the conversation took, it becomes the record everything else traces back to.
2. The estimate is drafted from what was said, and priced from what you actually charge
The draft is built in two passes. The first pulls a structured scope out of the conversation: line items, assumptions, what is out of scope, and what the customer needs to provide. Every line item is matched to a real item in the company's own catalog, so the model can't invent a part or a price. The second pass prices that scope.
Pricing comes from a stored set of estimation factors, not from memory:
- The products and services catalog, with current prices. Material prices that haven't been checked in 60 days are flagged for a re-check before the estimate goes out.
- Labor roles and bill rates, with mobilization (setup, staging and cleanup) included on every job.
- How much owner oversight the job needs, from review-only to hands-on in the field.
- Contingency for technical unknowns and scope risk.
- New construction versus retrofit. Open walls price very differently from finished ones, and when it's unclear, the estimator defaults to retrofit.
- Hardware handling and pass-through materials, passed through at cost plus tax, shipping and handling.
- A locked set of core assumptions for structured cabling, so every estimate states them the same way.
- The quote type: fixed price, cost plus margin, or time and materials.
Before the owner sees the draft, it is checked against the conversation: anything the conversation doesn't support is flagged instead of quietly written in.
3. Published to a page, not a PDF
The owner approves it, and the estimate goes out as a private, branded, expiring web page. There's nothing to log into and nothing to print. The owner gets a text the first time the customer opens it.
4. Accepted online, with a ceiling
The customer picks an option, types their name, ticks an acknowledgement, and confirms with a six-digit code texted to their phone (or emailed, if the text doesn't arrive). The code expires in ten minutes. The page is fingerprinted, so a page that changed after the customer opened it can't be accepted, and the exact page they saw is stored with their acceptance. Both sides get a signed PDF, and the owner gets a text.
That acceptance is deliberately capped: every option has to be under $2,000. Condicta Lite is built for small, clear time-and-materials jobs, and we would rather cap it than pretend a texted code is the right instrument for a large or contentious project.
5. Booked in the same motion
Once the estimate is accepted, the customer goes straight to a calendar and books the work. There's no phone tag to schedule it.
6. Close it out by talking
After the work, the tech dictates what was actually done: hours, parts, anything unexpected. On a real job, under four minutes of dictation produced the full work summary and invoice.
7. The record the customer keeps
The customer gets a gated service record: what was done, and for network work, the whole site documented, every device and every setting. It sits behind a one-time code sent to the customer's email.
Any passwords set or used on the job are stored in Bitwarden, not on the page. When the customer presses Reveal, the page confirms who they are, fetches that one password from the vault at that moment, and hides it again after two minutes. It's never stored in the page, and every reveal is logged.
8. The invoice, built from the work and the catalog
Invoice lines come from the same products and services catalog in Stripe, at actual time and materials. Before it goes out, the invoice is compared with what the customer accepted, so a big gap gets explained before the customer has to ask. The customer receives one branded, expiring page with the amount due, the charges, a short "what we did", a PDF download, a link to their service record, and Stripe's payment form embedded right in the page. The owner gets a text when the payment clears.
The number that matters
The point of all of this is time. The admin side of a job is meant to take about ten minutes of human attention, so the people doing the work spend their day on the work, not on estimating, documenting and invoicing it.
Here is where that stands, honestly. On a real job, scoping to a priced estimate took about nine minutes. The first job run all the way through, from scoping to the invoice page, took about eleven and a half minutes of human time, and part of the flow wasn't finished yet. It is now built end to end, and we expect it to come in under ten. We'll say it's under ten when a job has been timed there.
And for the bigger jobs
Condicta Lite is capped in dollars and in complexity on purpose. For work that is larger, more complex, or likely to end up in a dispute, we're piloting Condicta: the same idea, with full PandaDoc integration, digital signatures, and statements of work written in the shape the job is actually billed.
Condicta Lite is in pilot. If you run a service business where the owner is also the estimator and the bookkeeper, apply for the pilot.