Milestone Overview

Summary:

AccuLynx uses a series of milestones to track the progress of a job through the “Pipeline” from start to finish. Your company might use them in slightly different ways than what we describe here.

Review: 

When a potential customer is first added to AccuLynx, they start as a Lead. (Note: the Lead must be assigned to one of your AccuLynx users in order to enter the Milestone Pipeline. Until then, it is saved as an “Unassigned Lead.” Those can be found elsewhere on the Dashboard screen.)

Generally, a Lead needs to be qualified. This usually involves talking to the customer to determine whether they are a good fit for you, and whether you provide the service they are looking for, you fit in their budget, etc.

Once the customer is qualified, you would move them to the Prospect Milestone. This is the step at which you gather more information, usually resulting in an estimate, proposal, or (for insurance jobs) a contingency agreement. This information gathering usually includes visiting the property to obtain measurements, photos, and other details - shingle color, for instance

Once you come to an agreement with the customer and they sign a contract, you move the job to the Approved Milestone. If you have a Sales role in AccuLynx, you will need to submit the job for approval to move it to the Approved Milestone. Other roles are able to review the job and approve that move. Users in the Sales role would also need approval to move the job to the remaining Milestones.

When a job reaches the Approved Milestone it officially becomes a sale. It is assigned a job number and the contract amount is added to your sales total for reporting purposes. At this point the main physical part of the job (e.g. replacing the roof) takes place, along with all the preliminary tasks necessary. These could include obtaining permits, ordering materials, and setting up your labor.

Once you have verified that all aspects of the contract have been fulfilled, including any supplements, you would move the job to the Completed Milestone.

At the Completed Milestone you would verify the contract amount and send an invoice to whoever needs to see it. This could be the customer, mortgage company or insurance company.

Once the invoice is sent, you would move the job to the Invoiced Milestone to await payment.

When the balance has been received and all expenses have been entered and paid, you move the job to the Closed Milestone. This Milestone can be seen on the Jobs menu at the top of the AccuLynx screen. Once the job is Closed it cannot be edited anymore, but the customer is still saved/archived in AccuLynx. So if that customer returns in the future, you can easily generate a new job using their information.

The last one is the Canceled Milestone. You move a job to the Canceled/Dead Milestone when you or the customer has decided not to go forward with the job. This would typically happen at the Lead or Prospect Milestone.  To do this you will click the 3 dots on the top right of the milestone Bar and choose the option to Mark as Dead or Cancelled.

A Canceled job is not deleted. It is just removed from your active Pipeline, since you won’t be doing a job for that customer in the foreseeable future. Like the Closed Milestone, Cancelled can also be seen on the Jobs menu. 

Even if you are not personally responsible for moving jobs through all of these Milestones, it is good to be familiar with them so you will know how far along a job is and what should be happening to it at that Milestone.