Priced the way Plumber work is billed
A service call and a water heater install don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Plumber the way the work is really billed: off a flat service-call menu — a $125 service call, then priced work (e.g. $200 a line). Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Plumber jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Plumber work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Water heater install, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $960 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Plumber price
Two Plumber jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- What's behind the fixture — a closed system with a PRV or backflow means an expansion tank on a water heater, which is a real added line.
- Gas vs water — gas piping carries its own permit, pressure test, and inspection, and it prices separately from the water side.
- Emergency and access — a slab leak or a 2am call is not a daytime faucet swap, and the price should say so.
What a Plumber job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Plumber is no exception. SideWRK captures the fixture or system and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the fixture or system
- a closed-system flag (a PRV, backflow, or check valve means you need an expansion tank)
- water-heater code items — T&P valve, strapping, venting
- lead-free parts (NSF/ANSI 372)
- a gas-permit warning
Example note on a job: "Old galvanized line left in place at customer request."
How to price a Plumber job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Plumber job and tap a suggestion like "Service call" or "Drain clearing" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a flat service-call menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a flat service-call menu — a $125 service call, then priced work (e.g. $200 a line). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Plumber ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Old galvanized line left in place at customer request." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Plumber-specific records: the fixture or system, and a closed-system flag (a PRV, backflow, or check valve means you need an expansion tank).
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Plumber estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Plumber work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a plumbing license and a permit — and gas piping needs its own permit, pressure test, and inspection, which the app calls out. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Plumber pricing — common questions
How do I price a Plumber job in SideWRK?
You bill off a flat service-call menu — a $125 service call, then priced work (e.g. $200 a line). Add the work — Service call, Drain clearing, Faucet replacement — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Plumber job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like water heater install runs about $1,600 in the app — roughly $960 of that is your labor and about $640 is parts at your cost. Common Plumber work ranges from about $125 to $1,600. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Plumber job?
The records Plumber work actually needs: the fixture or system; a closed-system flag (a PRV, backflow, or check valve means you need an expansion tank); water-heater code items — T&P valve, strapping, venting. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Plumber work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a plumbing license and a permit — and gas piping needs its own permit, pressure test, and inspection, which the app calls out. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Plumber?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Nobody calls a plumber because they were thinking about you. They call because something is running down a wall. That means your first job on your own starts with a problem you can't fully see, in a house you've never been in, and a homeowner standing there waiting for a number. Four things in the app carry that ten minutes.
- The number goes out before the wall does. Tap Service call off the menu, add what you found, and send the estimate from the driveway. Your business name and logo are on it, and so is your license number if you've entered one in Shop. She approves by typing her name into the page, which states in plain words what she is doing: typing your name is your electronic signature on this approval. Anyone who has ever been handed a verbal number and then a bigger bill can tell the difference between the two at a glance.
- Then the wall opens, and that's where plumbers actually lose money. You quoted a leak repair; behind the drywall it's a corroded stub and two feet of galvanized. Add the lines from where you're kneeling and the link she already approved reopens as "Authorize the added work?" — showing what she agreed to before, and what the total is now. She taps it while you're still holding the saw. The extra work gets paid because it was authorized in writing, not because somebody remembered a conversation in a hallway. The full mechanics of mid-job scope live on adding work.
- Photos do the arguing. The green crust on the fitting, the swollen particle board under the cabinet, the flex line somebody installed in 1994. Take them while you're under there and they travel out with the estimate, which beats describing a fitting to somebody who has never crawled under a sink. They are also, for free, the answer to "that was already like that."
- On the tank job, take the deposit at yes. A water heater means you're buying the unit before anybody has paid you a dollar. Every estimate carries its own deposit setting: your shop default, waived, or one of 10, 25, 33 and 50 percent. Pick it on that estimate alone, and the card payment goes through the second they approve. Per job, not per business — the Saturday drain call takes none and the tank swap takes a third.
The fifth thing is the note you put on the work itself, and it's the one people skip. It prints under that line where the customer will read it, on the estimate and again on the invoice. Put down what you already told them in the crawlspace: what you deliberately left alone, what you warned them about, what should happen next. It costs a sentence now and settles an argument in March.
Repeat business, without a route
Start with the honest part: plumbing has no recurring plan in SideWRK, and the app doesn't pretend otherwise. Plans are switched on for the route trades — pool service, lawn accounts, quarterly pest, bin cleaning — where a visit is due on a calendar. Nobody schedules a plumber. So the repeat work in this trade hangs on the address instead of a cadence, and what the app does is make coming back to that address cheap.
- The property remembers itself. Every job can carry its own property record: a label, the service address, the fixture or system you worked on, and a closed-system answer — unknown, no, or yes, expansion tank may be required. When that number rings again next spring you already know what's in the house, so the quote can happen on the phone. A PRV you knew about before loading the truck is an expansion tank you brought with you, not a second trip.
- Coming back is a copy job, not a typing job. "Do this again" builds a new estimate against the same customer and the same property, carrying last visit's lines at last visit's prices for you to edit. One thing it leaves behind on purpose: any fee-credit line. Crediting a service call you haven't charged yet would be wrong, so it doesn't come along.
- A price you only had to argue yourself into once. Save a line you priced on a real job to your price book and it shows up in Add work as a starred chip with the number already on it. The hose-bib replacement you settled at $275 in May is still $275 in October, and you're not rebuilding it in somebody's driveway.
- Shoot the finished work, not just the failure. The strapped tank, the tidy cabinet under the sink, the drip pan that's actually plumbed to a drain. Photos of what you left behind belong on the job for the same reason the failure photos do — and what customers write about afterwards is almost never the pipe. It's whether the space looked worse when you left.
The one campaign in this trade worth running by hand. Before the cold sets in, go down your own customer list and text the people whose tanks you've already stood next to — a flush as its own small add-on visit, priced as your own line. Call it $85 and it's a booked hour from somebody who has already let you into their house. It's also the cheapest way there is to be standing in front of a twelve-year-old tank a month before it puts forty gallons on a finished floor, which is the $1,600 job further up this page. SideWRK opens that message in your own phone's texting app with the text already in it — you're the sender, not a platform, and it's one person at a time. There is no mass-text feature here and there never will be.
Getting those numbers into your phone in the first place is the other half, and it isn't a software problem. The review ask that works, why the on-the-spot version beats the one you text that evening, what one clean drain call is worth once the neighbor and her brother-in-law call too, and where the first jobs come from when you have no reviews at all — that's all in Do You Need a Plumbing License for Side Work?, which carries the referral half as well as the licensing half.
How plumbing bills, and what crediting the call does
There is no clock anywhere in a plumbing estimate here. The two boxes on a work line read Qty and Price each — you're selling a drain cleared, not ninety minutes under a sink — and the six starting prices up the page are the same six sitting inside the estimate form. That's the only way flat rate survives contact with a customer: one list, so the number you said on the porch is the number that prints.
The table up there leaves one row out. A seventh line, Labor (per hour), is there for the work that fits nothing on the menu — an hour tracing a stain across a ceiling to find where it's actually coming from. Your shop rate drives that line and nothing else, which is why the field is labeled the way it is where you set it: default labor rate, used only for custom time-based lines. SideWRK starts plumbers at $110 for it.
Everything hangs on the first line. The service call sits at the top of the menu at $125 for one reason: it is the only line you can bill before anybody knows what is wrong. A plumber who diagnoses for nothing is running a delivery service. An ordinary Tuesday, itemized the way the app assembles it:
The faucet goes on as an optional add-on, so if she leaves it for another month the same ticket lands at $240 — and $240 is exactly the menu price of the repair. That's the sentence worth being able to say on the phone: the call costs $125, and if you have me fix it, the $125 comes off. Parts ride underneath at what you actually paid, so the Money tab nets them out and shows you what you cleared rather than what you collected.
What the "− Credit service call" button does is worth knowing precisely, because most software can't do it at all. It writes one extra line at a negative price, and the customer's copy names it plainly: service call credited to repair. The $125 doesn't vanish from the ticket — it stays where she can see it with the credit sitting under it, which is the entire reason anyone believes the promise was kept. It can't be larger than what the job totals at that moment, and it's a one-time button: after the first credit line, it doesn't come back.
The other guard this trade wants is the job minimum. Set one per trade in Shop, and an estimate that lands under it tells you before it goes anywhere — under your minimum, add this much to reach it — with a button that adds the shop-minimum line for you. That's the answer to the forty-minute drive for a job that bills $60.
Multiplying jobs
The emergency brings the call. Whether it turns into a living depends on three things you will not think about again after Thursday: the quote that went quiet, the invoice nobody paid, and the wax ring you were out of. Not one of them needs you to remember it.
- The quote that went quiet. An estimate with no answer gets one email on day 3 and one on day 7, and then it stops. Repipe quotes are rarely turned down. They get read standing up, in a hallway, and never opened again.
- You hear the second they open it. Push lands on your phone the moment the estimate is opened — the one window where a follow-up call is welcome instead of pushy. No push set up? It arrives as email. Only ever one of the two: pinging you twice about a single open just trains you to ignore the phone.
- The balance chases itself. A wrapped job still owing gets reminders on days 3, 7 and 14, three and done, each carrying a link to pay. That link settles by card or Apple Pay, tapped from the customer's own phone. Money into an app you already use is a separate thing entirely: a payment request you build and send by hand, which is on Get paid and worth reading before you use one, because every one of those apps has rules about taking money for work.
- The review is asked for exactly once. The job wraps, the app sends the request, and a few days later it sends one reminder. Then it's finished. Two emails is the whole ask, on purpose — a homeowner who skipped both was never going to write the third one.
- The van's shortage turns up before the drive, not during it. Wax rings, supply lines, P-traps, Teflon tape, pipe dope, PVC cement: those six are seeded for plumbers, and every item holds a reorder number you set. Use one on a job, the count comes down, and you learn you're on your last wax ring while you're still near a supply house. Truck stock has the rest.
Want to see it instead of read it? The live plumber demo opens a made-up plumbing business with jobs, prices and paperwork already on it — free, nothing to sign. The emails above run on a server, so those you meet on real work. Feature by feature, that's SideWRK for Plumber.
Price it now
Before you say a number out loud, run it. The same free plumbing calculator the plumber app page carries, right here — a repipe by pipe type and footage, fixtures by the count, or a water heater by tank-or-tankless and fuel. No signup, nothing saved:
Open the full tool → · Work out your hourly rate → · Is a job worth the drive? →
The paper worth keeping
When plumbing fails it fails expensively: water finds the floor below and gas gives you no warning at all. That is the whole reason this trade keeps paper. Here is what each of the records listed above is actually for:
- The water-heater checklist, printed on the invoice. Seven items you tap through on the job: seismic strapping, the T&P relief valve and its discharge, an expansion tank on a closed system, a drip pan and drain, combustion air and venting, the permit and inspection, and lead-free connectors on the potable side. Each one cycles from blank to done to not-applicable. Whatever you marked done prints on the customer's copy as one line — water heater installed per code, followed by the items — so the tank you installed correctly says so on the paper, in the customer's hand, on the day. It's a record of what you did. It isn't a certificate, and it doesn't inspect anything.
- The permit, tracked and billed as its own line. The job carries a permit card with the number, the issuing authority, its status, and the inspections with their dates. Its fee bills as a permit line of its own rather than disappearing inside your labor, and the number ends up printed on the customer's paperwork next to your license number. Most plumbing work — water heaters, re-pipes, gas lines, sewer and water service — needs a permit and an inspection, and in most states a licensed plumber; and permit-required work is not covered by any small-job license exemption. Your local building department is the one that answers it for your address.
- Gas is its own conversation. Gas piping requires a permit, a pressure test and an inspection, and in many jurisdictions a licensed plumber or gas fitter. SideWRK does not verify your authority to do gas work — it writes down what you did, and nothing about a tidy record makes a job you weren't authorized to take into one you were.
- Lead-free, on the part and on the invoice. Potable-side parts can be tagged lead-free when you add them, and the tag rides onto the line the customer sees. Parts marked lead-free meet the NSF/ANSI 372 lead-free standard. On a trade where the wrong brass on a drinking-water line is a real problem and an invisible one, having it written down beats remembering it.
- Your license number, on the paperwork. You type it into Shop once and it prints on the estimate, on the invoice, and on the approval page they open. We know what you typed in that box and nothing more than that — whether the job in front of you needs a license, and which one, is your state board's answer and your building department's. Which rung of the apprentice-journeyman-master ladder can actually pull the permit, and why that catches out plumbers who are correctly licensed to do the work, is the subject of Do You Need a Plumbing License for Side Work? — read it before you quote a tank, not after.
- And come April it's already sorted. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, and what you spent on parts feed a year-end wrap-up — totals by category, CSVs, a printable sheet a preparer can work straight off. No shoebox.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it does not determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, permit, or plumbing-code requirement. It helps you keep the records. Meeting the rules stays yours.