Bid the repaint from the driveway and get paid at the final walkthrough

One Repaint, From the First Walkthrough to the Last Payment

Most painting jobs follow the same path. You walk the house with the homeowner and measure. You price the walls, ceilings, trim and prep, and wait for a yes. Then you buy the paint, book the crew, work around the weather, walk the finished rooms with the homeowner and collect. Handiwork follows that path with you, and every screen works on a phone, even with paint on your hands. You bid the repaint from the driveway and collect the final payment at the walkthrough.

Price It While You’re Standing in the Room

At the walkthrough, build the estimate on your phone while the measurements are fresh. Each line gets its own unit. Walls and ceilings go by the square foot, baseboard and door casings by the linear foot, patching and caulk by the hour, primer and finish coats by the gallon. Split the living room walls from its ceiling and the trim from the doors, so the homeowner can see what each part of the job costs and pick what to cut if the number is high. Add a discount when you’re matching another quote, set the tax rate, and Handiwork does the math.

As you type, Handiwork suggests line items you’ve entered before on that phone or computer, with the unit and price filled in. The tenth bedroom you price this month goes faster than the first.

Send the estimate by email before you back out of the driveway. The homeowner opens it on their phone. When they call or text to say go ahead, you mark it approved, and it becomes a job ready for the calendar. Nothing gets typed twice.

Photos From the First Visit On

Take photos at the walkthrough: the peeling fascia, the water stain on the ceiling, the cracked plaster by the stairs. Attach them to the estimate or the job and add a caption to each one. Keep shooting as the work goes. The siding after scraping, the patched drywall before primer, the finished room. When a homeowner asks what the trim looked like before you started, or a property manager wants proof the second coat went on, the pictures are on the job, next to the estimate and the invoice.

Crews and Jobs That Run for Days

A full exterior can take most of a week, and an interior repaint might run three days with a cabinet job squeezed in after. Book the exterior as one job from Monday to Thursday and it sits on the drag-and-drop calendar as one block. When the cabinets need to move to Friday, drag them there. Invite your crew lead onto the account with a login of their own, and they see the same calendar you do, so the Tuesday start isn’t news to anyone.

The homeowner gets an email when the job is booked. Handiwork sends a reminder the day before and another about two hours before the crew pulls up, so fewer mornings start with a locked gate and a homeowner at work.

When the Forecast Turns

Exterior work runs on the weather. Primer needs a dry surface, and every can lists the temperature and dry time the finish needs to cure. When three days of rain move in, drag the job to the next dry stretch. Handiwork emails the homeowner the new dates, and the reminders move with the job. You don’t spend the evening on the phone rearranging next week.

When the Homeowner Adds a Room

Halfway through the interior, the homeowner asks if you can do the upstairs hallway too. If they ask before approving the estimate, revise it and send the new version for a yes. If the crew is already working, add the hallway’s lines when you get to the final invoice: choose Edit on the invoice, add the new lines to the estimate, and re-issue the invoice with the new total. Every version of the estimate is saved. When the homeowner asks why the number went up, pull up the original next to the revised one and walk through the lines together.

The Final Walkthrough

Once the job is marked complete, one tap builds the invoice from the approved estimate, line for line. Walk the rooms with the homeowner, note the touch-ups, and send the invoice once you’re both happy. It goes out by email with a pay-now link, and the homeowner can pay by card or bank transfer from their own phone before you load the ladders. After a short hold, online payments are paid out to your bank when you request a payout. If they’d rather hand you a check, record it on the invoice and it’s marked paid.

Colors and Sheens for the Touch-Up Call

Write the colors and sheens on the customer’s record as you go: the hallway color, eggshell in the bedrooms, semi-gloss on the trim. Two years later, when the homeowner calls about a scuffed stairwell, you know which cans to bring before you get to the house. The touch-up gets its own small estimate and its own spot on the calendar, and every job you’ve done at that address is on the same record.

If you’re moving over from a spreadsheet or an old invoicing app, import your customer list from a CSV file, so repeat customers are already there when they call.

What It Costs

One painter or three crews, same deal: 3% of what you collect through Handiwork, capped at $79/month. There’s no subscription and no per-user fee, so adding a crew lead costs nothing. Stripe’s card processing fee applies on top, as it would with any provider. A slow winter month with no payments through Handiwork costs $0.

What Isn’t Built Yet

A few things painters ask about aren’t in Handiwork today:

• Deposits and progress billing. Each job gets one invoice for the full amount, so a deposit you take before buying materials is handled outside Handiwork for now.
• Crew assignments. Everyone on your account sees the whole calendar. You can’t yet put a named painter on a job.
• Lead-safe (RRP) records. There’s no checklist or recordkeeping for pre-1978 homes. Keep those records the way you do today.
• An installed app. Handiwork runs in your phone’s browser, with nothing to download.