The back-office terms that decide contractor profit.
19 plain-language definitions - the vocabulary behind answered calls, converted leads, clean books, and software that works. Every term links to the service that owns it.
Contractor In Charge supports the operations behind home-service businesses; it does not perform HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or other field trade work.
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Answer Rate
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The percentage of inbound calls a human actually answers - not voicemail and not an abandoned queue. Track it by coverage window and call type so overflow, after-hours, and staffing gaps are visible.
24/7 Live Answering → -
Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
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How long a caller waits before a person picks up. Review it alongside abandonment, coverage windows, and call type rather than treating one average as the whole customer experience.
24/7 Live Answering → -
Booking Rate
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Of the qualified leads that reach you, the share that ends as a scheduled job. Define what counts as qualified and bookable before comparing channels, agents, or time periods.
Leads to Revenue → -
Speed to Lead
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The time between a lead arriving (form, chat, paid platform) and your first real response. Same-day decisions like water heaters and no-cool calls are usually won by whoever responds first - which is why paid leads that sit for hours quietly close somewhere else.
Leads to Revenue → -
Overflow Answering
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Coverage for calls your office cannot take during simultaneous lines, lunch rushes, seasonal spikes, or staffing gaps. CIC reviews call volume, windows, routing, and booking workflows before defining scope.
24/7 Live Answering → -
After-Hours Dispatch
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The protocol that decides which nighttime calls page your on-call technician versus enter the next booking window. Scope depends on emergency criteria, escalation contacts, and field-platform handoffs.
24/7 Live Answering → -
Qualified Lead
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A contact that matches your rules: right service, right area, real intent, decision-maker on the line. Qualification is what separates paying for outcomes from paying for noise - it's the difference between a booked camera inspection and a wasted truck roll.
Leads to Revenue → -
Cost Per Booked Call
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What you spend to produce a scheduled job from a channel: channel spend plus handling cost divided by booked jobs. Use consistent qualification and attribution rules before comparing sources.
Leads to Revenue → -
Accrual Accounting
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Booking revenue when work is earned and costs when they're incurred - not when cash moves. For contractors it's the only way monthly margins mean anything, because material buys and progress payments rarely land in the same month as the work.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Reconciliation
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Matching every account's records against reality - bank, credit cards, and, in the trades, your field platform itself. Unreconciled months hide unbilled jobs, missed payments, and double entries. CIC reconciles every account monthly, including the FSM.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Profit Scorecard
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A one-page monthly view of what made money: margins by service line, job costs, and the trends behind them. CIC delivers accrual financials with a profit scorecard by the 10th.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Job Costing
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Tracking labor, materials, and overhead against each individual job so you know which work carries the company. Requires your field platform's cost fields to be set up correctly - a half-configured FSM makes honest job costing impossible.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Chart of Accounts
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The category structure your books are organized under. A generic chart hides trade realities; one structured for contractors separates service, install, and maintenance revenue so reporting answers real questions.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Pricebook
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The priced catalog of tasks and materials your technicians quote from in the field. CIC scopes pricebook work around the platform, data quality, service catalog, and workflow changes involved.
Systems & Software Optimization → -
FSM (Field Service Management)
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The platform that runs scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, and customer records - such as ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, Workiz, or FieldEdge. CIC supports workflow and reporting alignment inside the platform you run.
Systems & Software Optimization → -
Membership Program
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Recurring maintenance agreements that smooth seasonal revenue and give you first look at replacements. CIC scopes membership workflow support around setup, records, scheduling, and reporting needs.
Systems & Software Optimization → -
Progress Billing
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Invoicing larger projects in stages as milestones complete. When billing lags the work, you're financing the customer's project interest-free - current progress billing is a cash-flow discipline, not paperwork.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Change Order
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A documented scope change with its price, approved before the work happens. Untracked change orders - the ones living in text threads - are the most common leak on project work.
Full Service Bookkeeping and Accounting → -
Human in the Loop
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An escalation model where automation hands off to a person the moment a conversation exceeds its script. It's the honest middle ground in the AI-receptionist debate: automation for speed, humans for judgment - and for the caller with water coming through the ceiling.
24/7 Live Answering →
Apply these terms to your operating scope.
A Discovery Call reviews your call, lead, accounting, and software workflows and identifies which service scope fits.