Plumbing — commercial and residential
Forty techs, two departments, one board
Charlie’s Plumbing runs residential and commercial as two lines of business out of one company, with forty-plus technicians billing real work through ServiceProof against their real system, every working day. Not a pilot, and not a demo dataset.
ServiceProof is the most modern way to scale a plumbing company: the board, the field app, estimating, billing and the books on one platform, all of it answering to an AI assistant you can talk to from the truck or the car. And Wingman puts the checklist in every tech’s ear and the plumbing code in their pocket, even in a basement with no signal.
Two lines of business do not fit on one list
Residential plumbing is not commercial plumbing, and the person who dispatches one is not the person who dispatches the other. Most software makes you choose which of those two facts to model.
- A department is the line of business. Residential, commercial, service, install. It is who does the work and how it is measured.
- A zone is the territory and the P&L center. It owns a team — a CSR, a billing clerk, a fleet — and a timezone, and it is the unit you measure profit in.
- Departments cut across zones, because everybody has plumbing. Neither dimension nests inside the other, and a system that forces one inside the other has already lost half your reporting.
- Boards are named, saved sets of filters and there are as many as you want. Charlie’s runs three off one dataset — service on one, repairs on another, Draft Horse on a third — and each of them can carry its own rules.
One saved board. Commercial and residential work side by side, each card carrying the site, the complaint and the promise.
Wingman knows the code
Ask the plumbing code, not a chatbot
A code question deserves the code’s answer, not a chatbot’s best guess. Wingman’s own small AI does one job: it reads the question the way a plumber actually asks it and writes it as a formula. Our engine does everything that has to be exact. It looks up the value for the job’s jurisdiction, with the plumbing code first, then the state’s amendments, such as the DEP’s rules, and then the county’s, each one overriding the last. Then it does the math, shows its work and cites the section.
When a question doesn’t read cleanly, it asks you rather than guessing. All of it runs on the phone with no internet at all, in a basement, a crawlspace or an attic, because the model is our own, built from scratch and small enough to fit in about 2 MB. It learned only from the code itself and the way tradespeople talk, never from another AI’s answers.
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“is 315° over the limit for a T&P”
→ check 315 <= max temperature(relief_valve)
Not compliant. You have 315 °F; the relief valve maximum temperature is 210 °F.
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“quick question, dropping 10 inch in 7 feet, what grade is that”
→ compute 10 in / 7 ft
About 1 7/16 inch per foot.
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“hey – what size main at 1/4 inch per foot for 311 fixture units”
→ size building_drain[slope 1/4] for 311 dfu
5 inches (carries up to 480 DFU).
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“12 service sinks and 1 vanity sink – how many dfu all together”
→ compute 12 * drain_load(service_sinks) + 1 * drain_load(vanity_sink)
12 × 2 DFU (service sink) + 1 × 1 DFU (lavatory) = 25 DFU.
Real plumbing questions, word for word, with the formula Wingman read and the answer the engine worked out.
Your master plumber can teach it. Every formula lives in a workbook beside the ways people ask for it, so the person who knows the code best keeps it current by handing back a spreadsheet, with no programmer in the middle. Plumbing comes first, and the same method takes Wingman to every other trade.
The checklist in your ear, both hands on the work
Under a sink or halfway into a crawlspace, nobody should be thumbing through a phone. Wingman reads the checklist into any Bluetooth earpiece and listens to the answer, and one spoken sentence fills a dozen steps, each one checked exactly as a typed answer would be.
A photo you can’t take with both hands full is remembered as owed rather than skipped, and the job won’t close until it has been taken. The paperwork gets finished on the drive to the next call instead of at the kitchen table that night.
The PM is the schedule’s shock absorber
Quarterly agreements, backflow tests, seasonal work. When a heat wave lands or a freeze hits, PM work is what gets pushed — so deferrability is something the model carries from the first table rather than a feature added afterwards.
A window, not a date
Every occurrence carries earliest, target and due-by. The schedule knows what may move and how far before anybody starts dragging jobs around.
Bulk rescheduling is cheap
A freeze week does not mean a dispatcher moving sixty jobs one at a time, and finding out on Thursday which ones she should not have.
It warns you before a breach
Not after. If pushing this job puts you outside what the agreement promised, you hear about it while you can still decide something.
And a breach is recorded
At the time, with what happened. That is what an argument with a customer turns on a year later, and it either got written down when it happened or it did not.
Push the ones that can move. It tells you which cannot, before you do it — and the reason you type is stored on each one.
Backflow testing is the clean example: the test has a due date somebody else enforces, the work is short, and it stacks — so you want three in a day in one area, and you want to know which of them can slide a week and which cannot. How recurring work is modeled →
The callback you win because you walked in knowing
Every visit anyone ever made to that building. Every photograph going back years. The equipment that is actually installed and what its dataplate says. In the tech’s hand, in the truck, before they knock.
- You do not re-do last year’s repair and charge for it twice.
- The quote is grounded in what is actually there, not what somebody remembers.
- Notes are a subsystem, not one memo field everybody fights over — so the parts note, the billing note and the site note are all still legible after four people have touched the job.
- A note can belong to the customer and apply at every location that customer currently backs, including sublocations. When a national account changes hands, the right notes follow.
Years of site photographs, banded by year.
Found from a phrase in a note nobody remembers writing.
The other end of the same page
A two-truck shop should not pay an enterprise tax
Tarvin Plumbing is residential, small, and has no interest in configuring a P&L center to dispatch tomorrow’s work. Same board, same workflows, and none of the commercial machinery in the way — because zones, departments and agreements are things you turn on when you need them, not a setup wizard you have to survive first.