A CRM for a Lombard, IL business, starting with the enquiries nobody got back to.

The enquiries arrive in five places and get answered in about three.

A message on the Facebook page. A text to your personal number. A voicemail. A note somebody wrote on the back of a card. An email you read at a red light and fully intended to come back to. Every one of those was a person who, at that moment, was ready to give you money.

None of them get lost on purpose. They get lost because there's nowhere they were ever supposed to be, so "did anyone ever get back to her" is a question with no way of being answered. During a good week the true answer is often no, and you never learn it, because somebody who hears nothing doesn't complain. They simply go quiet and you assume they were never serious.

One place for the lot is the first thing this fixes. Each enquiry becomes a record carrying a name, a number, where it came from and whether it has been dealt with, and anything unanswered stays in front of you until somebody deals with it.

Booking that doesn't need you free to have a conversation.

The booking page reads the Google Calendar you already carry, so whatever you put on it privately — a school pickup, a delivery window, a morning you're taking back for yourself — stops being offered to the public. Nothing needs copying anywhere else, because a second diary never comes into existence.

For somebody who has never had this, the change is that phone tag ends. A customer calls while you're mid-job, they leave no message, you call back at ten to seven and they're eating dinner, and somewhere inside that gap they booked with whoever answered on the first attempt. That costs you the work and the twenty minutes of calling back you did anyway.

What lands is the name, the number, the job and the hour, and the customer hears back without you writing a word. A booking made at eleven at night is on the calendar before you wake up, spelled correctly, with the service already attached to it.

The regular who quietly stopped coming.

Nothing happens when you lose one, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed. There's no cancellation and no complaint. Somebody who came every six weeks for two years just isn't there in week seven, or week nine, and by the time it registers she has been going somewhere else since spring.

What that cost wasn't one appointment. It was every appointment she'd have made for the rest of the year, and in most cases she'd have stayed if a single person had noticed in week eight and said something.

The ledger knows her interval because it watched her keep it. Once she is past it she appears on a list with her number beside her, or a short note goes out on its own asking whether she wants her usual time. A good share of those people were only busy. A few have moved on and will tell you so, which is worth knowing as well.

The one who asked the price and then went quiet.

Every business has a pile of these and no way of seeing the size of it. Somebody called in April, asked a couple of questions, said they'd speak to their husband about it, and that was the end. You can picture two of them. There were thirty.

Almost none were a no. They were a maybe with nothing behind it to keep the maybe alive, and a maybe left alone becomes a decision made elsewhere. One message a few weeks later does most of the work: the price still stands, there's room in the next couple of weeks, and if the timing is wrong you'll leave them in peace.

Nothing currently competes with this, because nothing currently happens. People who didn't buy leave no trace at all, so the loss never lands on a report — and the size of that list is what surprises owners most on the first month they can finally see it.

The texts you'd send if you had the time.

Three of them do most of the work. A reminder the day before. A thank-you once they're back in the car. A check-in at whatever gap your trade runs on, whether that's six weeks, six months or every March. Each gets written once and then goes out carrying the right name and the right time without you touching it.

The reminder pays for itself first, because an empty two o'clock can't be sold to anybody afterwards at any price. The thank-you carries the review request, and for a business with no reviews yet that single line does more than anything else described here.

None of it should read like software. We write them the way you actually talk and you sign each one off before it goes anywhere near a customer, because a message that's obviously automatic reads as being handled by a machine — which is the one impression a small local business genuinely can't afford.

Invoices and card payments, once the customer side is working.

An invoice assembles itself out of the appointment already in the system — name, date, service, price — and goes out by text or email with a link that takes a card. Cash and checks carry on working precisely as they do now. This is a route added, not a habit taken away.

Payments record against the person rather than in a separate history somewhere else, so what was billed, what has been paid and what's still open sits on one screen per customer. Deposits work through the same connection, which is the usual answer to being burned on the jobs that block out a whole morning.

This sits sixth on the page on purpose. Early on, the money side is still small enough to hold in your head. The customer side isn't, and it's the half that decides whether there's a second year to do the accounting for.

Receipts go in where you're standing, and the books stay current.

Money going out gets written down beside money coming in. Photograph the receipt in the lot — fuel, materials, the tool you had to buy at eight in the morning, the flyers you had run off — and it's dated, categorized and filed against the work before you've climbed back into the van.

The alternative is a glovebox, a coat pocket and one ruined weekend a year. Paper that faded on a dashboard is tax you never owed and paid anyway, and in a first or second year that money is worth more to you than it ever will be later.

All of it syncs to QuickBooks, or to whatever your accountant prefers to work in, arriving already sorted so nobody re-types numbers that were typed once. If you haven't hired an accountant yet, this is the thing that makes hiring one cheap — handing over books that are current costs a fraction of handing over a box of loose paper, and you get quoted accordingly.

One page of numbers, emailed on the first.

The report comes to you rather than waiting behind a login. That distinction sounds trivial and isn't, because a dashboard you have to remember to open is a dashboard you'll open twice and then forget about.

• What came in, split by service, so it's obvious which work is carrying you
• What went out, by category, with the previous month set beside it
• Who is overdue for a visit, listed by name with a number
• How many customers were new against how many came back
• What's still unpaid, and how long it has been that way

What it costs, and what the cheaper plan won't do.

All of it sits inside Growth: $500 each month, and $500 once, at the beginning. That figure includes the website standing in front of it, the profile, the email at your domain and the search work — it isn't an add-on price sitting on top of a website price.

Foundation, at $250 a month with a $250 setup, contains none of this page. Better you have that from a page you can re-read than from somebody talking fast on a phone. Foundation is the getting-found half, and for a business with no site and an unclaimed profile that's frequently the right thing to buy first.

A year paid up front takes 15% off — $2,550 on Foundation, $5,100 on Growth, working out at $212.50 and $425 a month, with setup billed separately. Two extras can sit on top of whichever plan you pick: phone answering around the clock for $100 a month, and automated replies to your Google reviews for $130. Work outside all that gets quoted on its own, in writing, before anybody begins it.

The term is a year, and the bill arrives on the same date each month. The reason is the one we give everybody: three months is roughly how long a site takes to begin paying for itself, and a shorter agreement mostly buys a cheaper build.

• The full Foundation build, with a ledger sitting under every part of it
• One inbox for calls, forms, texts and messages, and nothing unanswered hiding in a pocket
• Booking synced to the Google Calendar you already carry, with confirmations and reminders attached
• Follow-up for customers who lapsed and for enquiries that never became work
• Invoicing, card payments, deposits, and everything outstanding on a single screen
• Receipts captured from your phone, accounting kept in step, and the monthly page of numbers