Automating sales, accounts and job costing for a commercial painting contractor
A contractor that paints and coats commercial buildings under three brands runs its sales on Salesforce and cold email, its estimating and production on monday.com and its accounts in QuickBooks Online. The Make automation described here covers lead research, cold-email health, inbox triage, job set-up, a two-way accounts sync and job costing.
- reusable flows
- 8
- scenarios read in full
- 19
- runs in the windows read, 12 errors
- 9,260
The organisation
The contractor paints and coats commercial property under three brands, across more than one US time zone. Sales find and work leads in Salesforce and reach them by cold email from many mailboxes; estimating, purchasing, work orders and production run on monday.com; the accounts are kept in QuickBooks Online; and most materials come from one national paint supplier.
It is a large Make account, with several hundred scenarios built since 2023, from cost-breakout boards and proposal generation to subcontractor onboarding. The busiest work now sits at the two ends of the business: finding and qualifying leads at volume, and making sure every cost lands on the right job.
This page and the flow pages draw on nineteen scenarios read in full. Each flow has its own page, because most would apply, as they are, to another contractor or to any business that sells to companies and costs its work by job.
What we built
- 01
Work-email finder waterfall
Fills in missing work emails on decision-maker leads, two providers deep.
1 scenario · read the flow - 02
Asynchronous AI lead research
Sends leads and companies to an AI research agent and files titles, fit, scores and property types.
6 scenarios · read the flow - 03
AI engagement refresh
Writes a fresh AI summary of each lead's engagement into the CRM every weekday morning.
1 scenario · read the flow - 04
Cold-email sender health and outcome sync
Keeps the sending mailboxes healthy and writes cold-email outcomes back to the CRM.
2 scenarios · read the flow - 05
AI inbox triage
Files the main inbox's routine mail and alerts on what needs a person.
1 scenario · read the flow - 06
Job workspace provisioning
Sets up each opportunity's folder, photo project and imagery, and hands won deals to kickoff.
2 scenarios · read the flow - 07
QuickBooks and monday.com two-way sync
Keeps bills and expenses in step between the accounts and the job boards.
3 scenarios · read the flow - 08
Supplier bills and invoices matched to jobs
Puts supplier bills and invoices on the right job, with a review queue for the doubtful ones.
3 scenarios · read the flow
The outcome
Eight flows and nineteen scenarios. In the History windows read for this page, between 18 September and 21 October 2026, they ran 9,260 times with 12 errors and one warning.
The lead side carries the volume: the AI research hand-off alone accounts for 4,339 of those runs, its receivers filing hundreds of answers an hour.
The money side is the most exacting. The bill sync, bill attribution, PDF fetch and invoice linking ran 1,521 times in their windows without an error; eleven of the twelve errors were in the hourly expense reconciler, and the other in opportunity provisioning.
Where it stops
This page covers nineteen of several hundred scenarios. Estimating, proposals, subcontractor onboarding, work orders, billing approvals and a set of monitoring scenarios run in the same account and are not described, nor are scenarios seen only through their run history. Run counts come from History windows of different lengths, so they show activity rather than totals. In the supplier-invoice area several scenarios are dry runs, one-off back-fills or switched off, and none of those is described.
Built with
- Make.com
- Salesforce
- monday.com
- QuickBooks Online
- Anthropic Claude
- EmailBison
- Gmail
- Slack
- Google Drive
- Make data store
Page copy drafted with AI assistance. Skofi is accountable for it. Editorial policy
Run a business like this one?
The flows above are reusable. A short call is the fastest way to find out which of them fits yours.
What happens on the call
- 15 minutes, no deck
- We map the process on the call
- A written scope, or an honest no